LOC Announces Complete Digitization of News Photo Collection

The Library of Congress has announced that all the negatives in the George Grantham Bain news photograph collection (about 40,000 glass negatives) have been digitized and are available in the LOC's Prints and Photographs Online Catalog. You can start at http://memory.loc.gov/pp/ggbainhtml/ggbainabt.html.

The entire collection spans from the 1860s to the 1930s, but the majority of the photographs in the collection span the 1900s to the 1920s. You can search the collection at http://memory.loc.gov/pp/ggbainquery.html. The search page is a little odd; there are two forms on it. The top one is for searching the full keywords of the prints while the bottom one is for just searching subject headings and formats. Think full text search engine versus searchable subject index.

I searched for baseball. In top search form, I got 544 results, while on the bottom form I got 466 results. The default result listings are in a text-only format though you can get a grid of photo thumbnails by clicking the Preview Images button. Photo pages themselves contain a thumbnail, title, subject header, date, and item number. (While some of the dates contain the exact year of the photograph a lot of the ones I saw were approximate.) Clicking on the thumbnail gives you a larger version and the option to download archival-quality versions.

If you're into baseball, do a full-text search for Ty Cobb or Babe Ruth. Great photographs. The one with Babe Ruth and the little mascot is especially cute.

Posted to Reference-Libraries-Collections