Meghan C. Blog 3: Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) Photographs

(Photograph)

The University of Washington Libraries has digitized this collection of photos from the New Deal era of American history in Seattle, W.A. and the King County area. The photos depict the lives of Americans just trying to make through the rough times of the depression and finding ways to combat the economic situation by doing work within their communities. The collection includes photographs of people working on bridges, schools, park grounds, and other building constructions, as well as people doing general trade work like making furniture and sewing. The FERA collection details an important period in this communities history and gives photographic evidence of how much of the area came to be constructed. The digital collection consists of 274 images that were selected from over 800 different photographs.


Collection Principles
It seems as though the collection was narrowed down due to the situation with the Crossing Organizational Boundaries IMLS Grant. This grant was given to the King County Snapshots digital collection, which encompasses 13 different organizations that helped create the overall collection which the FERA collection is apart of. The images were selected mostly by importance to the collection as a whole and the lack of funding to support digitizing the entire collection.

Object Characteristics
The 274 photographs were scanned at 3000 pixels on an 8 bit grayscale. The images were saved as TIFF's and then later re saved as JPEG files for use on their website. They were re sized to 640 pixels and linked through contentdm. The images are nice, but I feel a little let down by their lack of zoomability. When clicking on an image it brings you to its largest possible view and below that is the title, description and metadata for the scanned image. Yet, I wish there were more. The website does offer some information on the time period from which these photographs were taken, which is very helpful to anyone wishing to do some more extensive research.

Metadata
The metadata seems very inclusive with a lot of links and controlled vocabulary, helping the user better acquaint themselves with the research or images they are looking for. The information included is a little bit redundant, including much of the information that is on the homepage of the site. It is good for those that are unaware of this, but this information is repeated on every single image. It seems slightly unnecessary, but still someone encountering this information through a link would, I'm sure be very appreciative of it. The metadata also contains information on how to attain copies of the images, and a request link which is nice.

Intended Audience
The audience for this particular site and collection would most likely come to it by way of the community, wishing to track down images of their family members or former residences, or the academic body wishing to do research on the vast topics of life during the depression in the King County area. The collection seems as though it is very organized towards the development of awareness towards this time frame and community in general.