LOC Adds Two New Collections

The Library of Congress has added two new collections. There's the The North American Indian: Photographic Images. There's also Emergence of Advertising in America, 1850-1920: Selections from the Collections of Duke University.

The North American Indian collection is available at http://memor y.loc.gov/ammem/award98/ienhtml/curthome.html . Bear in mind that this collection was originally published in book form in the early 20th century and contains references to Native Americans that reflect the attitude of the time. There are also materials in the collection that were not meant for public viewing. The LOC has included all images in this collection, which contains over 1500 illustrations and 700 portfolio plates.

The site may be searched by keyword, browsed by subject, or browsed by tribe/geographic location. Eighty tribes are represented here, from the Achomawi Indians of the Pacific Northwest to the Yuki Indians of California. Clicking on a tribe name will give you a list of photographs relevant to that tribe. Choosing one will give you a thumbnail (in some cases, I found the thumbnail to be too small), summary (I found there was a caption to the photograph about 1/3 of the time), notes, relevant subjects, object type, repository, and digital ID. Clicking on the picture will give you a larger picture and the opportunity to download an even higher resolution JPEG version.

The Emergence of Advertising in America, 1850-1920 is available at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award98/ncdhtml/eaahome.html . This collection contains over 9,000 images related to early advertising in the US. As always, you can search by keyword or browse by subject. In this case, however, you may also browse through categories of advertising. Categories include ephemera, broadsides, tobacco advertising, and scrapbooks.

After you pick a category you'll see an introduction to the category with some history behind it. For the categories that I looked at, when you do that you move off the LOC site and onto the site of Duke University. This is confusing because Duke uses a different navigation style. Anyway, Duke provides an outline of available images in different categories. Picture pages include a thumbnail with links to change the size of the picture, year of publication, company, notes, etc.

There's nothing wrong with Duke's navigation style, but if you constantly flip back and forth between that and the LOC's you may find yourself confused. In that case you may want to stick to browsing by the LOC's subjects or searching their site by keyword. You'll still end up on the Duke site if you click on the pictures to get larger pictures, but you won't have to remember both navigation formats.

Posted to Reference-Libraries-Collections