Note Managing Image Collections

A Practical Guide
1. Auflage 2011
ISBN: 978-1-78063-056-4
Verlag: Elsevier Science & Techn.
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 232 Seiten

Reihe: Chandos Information Professional Series

This book explores issues surrounding all aspects of visual collection management, taken from real-world experience in creating management systems and digitizing core content. Readers will gain the knowledge to manage the digitization process from beginning to end, assess and define the needs of their particular project, and evaluate digitization options. Additionally, they will select strategies which best meet current and future needs, acquire the knowledge to select the best images for digitization, and understand the legal issues surrounding digitization of visual collections. - Offers practical information for the busy information professional - Concentrates solely on image management - Focuses on unique needs of born digital and digitized images

Margot Note has a Master's in History from Sarah Lawrence College, a Master's in Library and Information Science, and a Post-Master's Certificate in Archives and Records Management, both from Drexel University. She is a Certified Archivist based in New York and is the Director of Archives and Information Management at World Monuments Fund, an international historic preservation organization.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Note, Margot

Leseproben

1 Photographic image history
Abstract:
Comprehending the history of photography provides an intellectual foundation for information professionals working in cultural heritage institutions to preserve a vast and challenging photographic legacy. Additionally, knowledge of photographic formats in historic collections is an integral part of a comprehensive understanding of the complex medium of photography. Focusing on photographs with enduring value as resources for research, publication, exhibition, and teaching, this chapter explores the development of photographic records from historical, aesthetic, and sociological perspectives. Photography’s history reveals the range of different materials, chemicals, and processes involved in capturing images, as well as the technical developments of plates, film, and cameras. Photography’s commercial expansion, the development of image collections, color photography, and digital technology are also explored. Keywords cartes-de-visite daguerreotypes digital technology image collections photographic history The very things which an artist would leave out, or render imperfectly, the photograph takes infinite care with, and so renders its illusions perfect. What is the picture of a drum without the marks on its head where the beating of the sticks has darkened the parchment? (Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1859) A knowledge of photography is just as important as that of the alphabet. The illiterate of the future will be ignorant of the use of camera and pen alike. (László Moholy-Nagy, 1923) Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself. (Berenice Abbott) Introduction
At the end of the twentieth century, digital images emerged as the dominant visual medium. “The means by which we create and share image information is rapidly changing, as digital photography stands poised to replace its film-based predecessor” (Terras 2008, viii). The ease of which digital images can be taken, manipulated, and distributed supports the claim that digital photography has already replaced analog image capturing. For instance, in 2007, over 90 percent of cameras sold were digital, nearly a billion camera phones were in use, and an estimated 250 billion digital photos were taken (Ritchen 2008, 11). Digital photographs blur the traditional definition of photography because images are made by means of a photoelectric effect. Some historians believe that digital technology embodies a continuation of themes and practices associated with chemical photography, but others suggest that digital images are radically different from what preceded them. When it was introduced in the nineteenth century, photography threatened painting, as its mechanical technique became more popular and affordable than the handmade arts. In the twenty-first century, digital photography may result in an even more distant relationship to analog photography. Digital photography expresses a monumental change while, paradoxically, citing a medium that dates from the industrial era. Although digital photography shares a similar developmental pattern with the early history of traditional photography, which was grounded in scientific inquiry and discovery, a more critical examination reveals that digital images possess some fundamentally new and different technical properties. The new production and distribution practices of digital imagery are radically changing the ways in which images are used, understood, and valued. For instance, digital imaging technology began to permeate the communications industry by the 1980s. Enthusiasm for the possibilities of this new medium gave way to concern, as digital images can be altered in innumerable ways. The emergence of digital technology, which allows for the manipulation of images without leaving any evidence of the intervention, poses a fundamental challenge to traditional notions of documentary evidence. Additionally, while traditional photography is losing its influence in photojournalism and amateur photography, the analog photograph is increasingly becoming an object of public discourse. In the past few decades, historians and other scholars in the humanities have widened their interests. It would have been impossible to conduct research in relatively new fields in the humanities—such as women’s history, labor history, material culture, etc.—if scholars had limited themselves to the traditional records of evidential value preserved in archives. Images, specifically photographs, are part of this broader range of evidence. In the mid 1960s, Raphael Samuel and other historians became aware of the value of photographs as evidence for nineteenth-century social history, helping them to construct a ‘history from below’ focusing on the everyday life and experiences of ordinary people. In 1985, a symposium on the evidence of art was held by American historians, published in a special issue of the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. The subject attracted so much interest that it was soon republished as a book, Art and History: Images and their meanings (1988). Since then, images have increasingly been used by: historians, teachers and students, illustrators, architects, designers and hobbyists, collectors and curators of various objects, even by librarians. Everyone accepts that the art historian needs pictures to pursue his or her research, but other kinds of historians find information in photographs and drawings, in paintings and prints, useful for their study of the past. (Shatford 1986, 41) Images are now treated as evidence in and of themselves, not supplemental to text, but records in their own right. Information professionals working in archives, libraries, museums, and similar institutions find themselves dealing with visual collections that are in transition, shifting from chemically processed to digitally produced materials. Images “can be very intimidating to the non- specialist who is forced to deal with them simply because his institution owns them and there is no photography specialist” (Dooley 1995, 85). Images “prompt complex rhetorical negotiations,” are “fertile, underused and vulnerable to misinterpretation,” and “have not received the level of intellectual research needed to develop the theoretical bases behind their access” (Finnegan 2006, 121; Mifflin 2007, 32; Beaudoin 2007, 24). The principles underlying the management of digital images are the same as those that support analog collections. Their practical application may differ according to the needs of one medium or the other, but where records in both media are to be managed in tandem, there is a need for as much commonality as can be achieved in this hybrid environment. “Recognition of the significance of photographs depends upon an understanding of the historical developments depicted in the images and of photographic technologies, aesthetics, and attitudes” (Huyda 1977, 10). Knowledge of photographic processes can assist in identification and interpretation, preservation and storage, and digitization, as well as in a plethora of other image collection-related activities. Image collections: have not enjoyed a high profile in libraries and archives, and although recognized by users as extremely valuable, have not generally been the object of the serious consideration of [information professionals], [but] the reality of the contemporary information economy is that images are in higher circulation and higher demand than words and print. (Turner 1993, 245; Harris 2006, 213) Technology and images
Photographic technology did not develop linearly, one process replacing another, but with a number of processes used concurrently for their aesthetic or economic values. Each medium filters the world according to its own characteristics. “By the last half of the nineteenth century, photography was vigorously asserting its ascendancy over [representative mediums like woodcuts, engravings, and lithography] in a way that echoes the tension between analog and digital technologies today” (Mahard 2003, 9). From its inception, photography has been closely related to science and technology. Baxter (2003) writes: As the technical side of photography evolved, the processes used had an effect on the intrinsic qualities of the images as well as the carrying medium: the machinery of photography affects the content of the photograph more than the machinery of typing affects the content of a letter. Jammes and Janis (1983) write, “By situating the [photographic] discoveries within the evolution of science and technology, [inventors of photography] established a tradition that would mark every written account that followed: the story of photography would be the history of its technique” (xi). Panofsky (1937), in his famous essay discussing film, remarked: “It was not an artistic urge that gave rise to the discovery and gradual perfection of a new technique; it was technical invention that gave rise to the discovery and gradual perfection of a new art” (122). Technology is involved in every stage of photography: acquisition technologies capture the image,...