Jessi Fishman Blog 3: Wisconsin Historical Images Cigarette Trading Cards Collection

I found the website for the Cigarette Trade Cards Collection in a rather strange way but I'm glad I did. I searched for "birds" on the Smithsonian Library and Archival Exhibitions on the Web page (because I like birds) and was surprised to see a link to a site about cigarette trade cards (I also like trade cards). So I went to it, and found the very well-designed and full-of-stuff site known as the Wisconsin Historical Images section of the Wisconsin Historical Society. This site has numerous online exhibitions, many of which sound very interesting, but I decided to stick with the trade cards.

Collection Principles
I gathered information about the collection principles behind the Wisconsin Historical Society's Archives right from the "learn about the collections" part of the website..."The Wisconsin Historical Society's Archives collections include approximately three million photographs, negatives, films, cartoons, lithographs, posters, and ephemeral materials from private, business, and governmental sources that document the rich social, economic, and political history of Wisconsin and the upper Midwest... In addition to strong holdings in regional history, the collections have a national focus in the areas of nineteenth century expeditionary photography, Native American images, mass communications, and social action movements, including labor and civil rights." You can really tell from examining this site that the people behind the digitization efforts at the Wisconsin Historical Society are putting a lot of thought into their online exhibitions...the site is clean, aesthetically pleasing, and easy to use, information about permissions and about the opportunity to purchase prints and digital files are readily available, and there are a variety of interesting functions and materials available as well.

Object Characteristics
This is a rather small collection, so all of the objects are listed in alphabetical order, and each has a very lovely thumbnail of the associating image to look at to see if you want to open and learn more about it. Each object is named with a persistent, unique identifier that conforms to the overall naming scheme, and the links to enlarge or buy the image open in a new window for easy viewing. You can also e-mail the image to a friend directly from the object's page. The name and identifying number for each object show up in the title bar of the page to avoid getting lost, and the images are clear, crisp, and beautiful.


Metadata
As to be expected, the accompanying metadata for the objects in this collection is great. There is a large title and description section, followed by the image id, the creator name (if known), the collection name, the genre, and detailed additional information. The search function does not work in individual collections, however, but instead spans the entire online collection, so you usually get more results than you would have hoped for, but still can find what you are looking for and find some other cool stuff along the way. The good metadata records definitely convey that the Wisconsin Historical Society digitization people really know what they're doing and care about the interoperability, access to, and long term management of their materials.

Intended Audience
There are so many interesting collections on the Society's site that the intended audience for the whole thing must be enormous. As for this particular collection, I would say the intended audience could range from serious researchers interested in ephemera from the late 1800s to anyone who happens to like birds and can search in the right places for them. Another intended audience group could be bubblegum (or other trade) card enthusiasts or people interested in the history of advertising.