Claire B. Blog 3: University of Washington Fashion Plate Collection

The Fashion Plate Collection from the University of Washington Libraries Digital Collections is a collection of original fashion plates collected by Blanche Payne, a professor of historic costume and apparel design at the University of Washington in the early 20th century. She joined the University in 1927, and conducted research on clothing and historic costume. She also supervised work in on the Textile Costume Study Collection housed in the Home Economics Department. Primarily interested in Eastern Europe, she traveled extensively, collecting original ethnic costumes, textile, and embroidery examples. Blanche Payne studied Eastern European dress and costume extensively, but the focus of this particular collection is a bit more narrow.

Collection Principles

These plates come from leading French, British, American, and other fashion journals of the 19th and early-20th century. The information about the plates was researched and prepared by the UW Libraries Special Collections and Cataloging staff in 2002. There are 417 digital images in the collection, covering many stylistic periods in English and French history. Not all plates from the collection were digitized, however.

Object Characteristics

The images were scanned in color using a Microtek Scanmaker 9600L and saved in .jpg format, most at 150 dpi and with some resizing work done. Some of the images were manipulated (no information on specifics given) to clarify the digital image. The scanned images were linked with descriptive data using the UW Content program. The site includes low-resolution thumbnails and one level of enlargement.

Metadata

The site allows keyword searching, browsing by subject, listed alphabetically (e.g., Dresses, Outerwear, Veils), and general browsing of the entire collection. The site uses CONTENTdm and offers pretty extensive metadata with enlarged images, including publication date, original source, descriptive notes about the particular piece of clothing or outfit, which historical period the clothing comes from, the repository and call number where the plate can be located, and a physical description of the plate.

The metadata for each plate also includes transmission data, which gives information on what was scanned, at how many dpi, which format (all are JPEGs), resizing information, and the compression rate at which the image was saved. Unfortunately, there is no documentation on this digitization project, only information on each specific plate. Since the University of Washington has a pretty extensive list of digital collections, it would have been nice to know a bit more about the process.


Intended Audience

The collection site has quite a bit of information on Blanche Payne, so anyone looking for information on her work gets a good overview and a (short) bibliography of her published work. The main page offers five plates giving examples of dress from a few of the periods covered (Empire, Georgian, Victorian, and Edwardian), but the description of the clothing in the plates is not incredibly in-depth and someone who was not already familiar with these periods would probably have a hard time understanding what common characteristics tied together the clothing from different periods. Regardless, the images are beautiful and fun to look at, whether you are an expert on fashion or the particular periods covered or not, so I imagine this site holds appeal to average browsers. Searching for specific pieces of clothing or subject terms is nice for more knowledgeable searchers, but the appeal really seems to be in the images themselves, not the collection's organization or layout.