[Genealib] Other means of preserving photographs

[Susan Scouras]

While scanning is great and has allowed many families, communities and
organizations to share photos and to post them online, photographs of
historical significance should be copied in a more permanent medium as
well.  For anyone in West Virginia, the West Virginia State Archives has
a photocopying project whereby an archivist or historian accompanies an
archival photographer to a site sponsored by a local society, church,
civic group, library, etc., and conducts a photo shoot.  The sponsor is
responsible for promoting the event and organizing the day's activities.
The archivist or historican will work with those attending to select
photographs judged to be of historical significance (this includes
family photos if at least one person can be identified and at least an
approximate date and location assigned), and the archival photographer
will make a photographic copy of the image.  The archival photographer
can make copies of photos that are stuck to glass or can't be removed
from a frame for other reasons, panaramic photos, oversize portraits,
tintypes, daugerrotypes, etc., most of which can not be scanned
successfully.  The black and white negatives are retained by the State
Archives.  Prints can be made from glass plate negatives and other
formats as well, but not on site.  The West Virginia State Archives
accepts donations of digital images when that is all that is available,
but will try to arrange for photographing of the actual photographs as
well.  
 
Frequently asked questions about the photocopying project:
http://www.wvculture.org/faq.aspx?Category=6
<http://www.wvculture.org/faq.aspx?Category=6> 
 
Photographs and finding aids online:
http://www.wvculture.org/history/photographs.html
 
Some of the staff's favorite photos over the years (although "pics of
the week" is a bit of a misnomer since most are usually up for a month
or more):
http://www.wvculture.org/history/picoftheweek/picsoftheweek1.html
<http://www.wvculture.org/history/picoftheweek/picsoftheweek1.html>
Not all of the images are photographs nor are they all black and white:
http://www.wvculture.org/history/picoftheweek/pic44.html.
 
We also provide digital images upon request for a fee for patrons and
commercial clients who require or prefer that medium.  In addition, we
are currently capturing still images from various moving image media and
storing them digitally.  An example:
http://www.wvculture.org/history/picoftheweek/pic47.html.
 
Something more organizations need to think about is preserving the
negative files of professional photographers in their area.  We have
been lucky to receive the collections of several photographers,
especially of two photographers who served primarily the African
American community.  Some of their work is on our Web site:
http://www.wvculture.org/history/bhm.html.  This project showed us how
posting photographs online could excite a patron base and bring in more
photographs, as well as lots of help in identifying names, places, dates
and events for photographs for which we had little or no information.  
 
Photo identification projects can accompany or follow your scanning
parties.  Make standard photocopies or printer copies of photographs and
ask people to write on the paper copies or attach colored post-it notes
with names of those in the photographs and other relevant information,
including their own names and contact info.  My own church was quite
successful in getting parishioners to identify photos going back as much
as fifty years.  
 
Susan Scouras
Librarian
WV Archives and History Library
The Cultural Center
1900 Kanawha Blvd. East
Charleston, WV  25305-0300
(304) 558-0230, Ext. 742
 
 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.acomp.usf.edu/pipermail/genealib/attachments/20070816/eeca9d24/attachment.html