Many motion picture theaters in 1914 were tucked into existing buildings. The Isis theater was located in Seattle's Washington Building near Pioneer Square. A. Curtis 31226.
Many motion picture theaters in 1914 were tucked into existing buildings. The Isis theater was located in Seattle's Washington Building near Pioneer Square. A. Curtis 31226.
Nearly a decade ago, an ambitious experimental project in the Special Collections and Preservation Division resulted in transforming more than 24,000 historical photographic prints into a single silvery disc that held the digitized images linked to a database that indexed their contents. We thought we were on the verge of a transformation in the way that researchers would access photographs and other images. Now we know that this transformation is well underway. That initial project, the J. Willis Sayre American Vaudeville and Theatre Photograph Collection, is once again at the forefront of change.
Three years ago, the Center for Information Systems Optimization (CISO) was looking for a test database for a new product that was under development called Content* that would permit extremely rapid searching and retrieval of both images and text, and could deal with the huge digital files that are required for quality images. For the test, the J. Willis Sayre project was converted to an early version of Content, and the result was a dramatic improvement in speed of access to data and images, and a vast new flexibility in searching options.
A cable car on Madison Street, Seattle, during a regrading of the street in 1907. A. Curtis 01885.
Special Collections is now involved in developing other projects that will combine digital images and data using the Content software. A collection of 1,704 historical photographs from the well-known Asahel Curtis studio, documenting Washington state and the Pacific Northwest from the 19th century until 1940, has been scanned and combined with a detailed descriptive inventory. You can see a preview of the photographs.
A number of other projects are either underway or proposed. A student from the Graduate School of Library and Information Science is working on the William Meed photo collection, which depicts the Klondike gold rush, especially steamboat transportation on the Yukon River, from 1897 to 1907, as documented by a number of photographers, including Meed himself.
Native Americans from throughout the Pacific Northwest gathered on the banks of the Spokane River for the First National Indian Congress, October 1925. A. Curtis 49602.
A grant proposal has been submitted for a collaborative Web-based project with the UW, the Eastern Washington State Historical Society and the Museum of History and Industry. If funded, this project would combine historic photographs of American Indians from all three institutions, along with descriptive data, historical documents from the Manuscripts and University Archives Division, popular essays written for the site, and a series of study questions based on the photographs. The intent is to provide a Web site of photographs of Pacific Northwest American Indians broad enough and deep enough to support serious research on a number of topics. Students from grade school to graduate school would find useful images that could be easily downloaded for personal research or school projects.
Other proposals using the unique or scarce materials in Special Collections are in the discussion stage. The history of theater and entertainment in the Pacific Northwest (including the Sayre collection mentioned above) is a possible topic, one which might involve not only historical photographs but also resources such as theater programs, posters, scrapbooks, manuscripts, and architectural plans. Other possibilities involve particular collections of photographs and architectural drawings, such as those by Frank LaRoche (western Washington and southeastern Alaska photographs from the 1880s and 1890s), Wilhelm Hester (maritime photos on Puget Sound in the early 1900s) and Charles A. Darmer (Tacoma architectural plans of the 1890s and 1900s). Early travel publications, maps, and promotional magazines are also possible future projects.
At the heart of all proposals is the immense opportunity that the new technology offers of making scarce resources widely available, while at the same time the resources themselves are spared from excessive use and handling. It also means that the Libraries must make a heavy investment in preparing these materials for use by this new worldwide audience, a task that involves research, writing, graphic design, software design, and user studies. It's daunting, but it's also immensely intriguing.
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