Elizabeth S. Blog #4: Charles & Ray Eames (Library of Congress Online Exhibit)

Charles & Ray Eames: A Legacy of Invention

This online exhibit was created to supplement a traveling exhibition curated by the Library of Congress in partnership with the Vitra Design Museum.

According the exhibition overview,
"Charles and Ray Eames practiced design at its most virtuous and its most expansive. From the 1940s to the 1970s, their furniture, toys, buildings,films, exhibitions, and books aimed to improve society--not only functionally, but culturally and intellectually as well. The Eameses' wholehearted belief that design could improve people's lives remains their greatest legacy. Even more remarkable is how they achieved their seriousness of purpose with elegance, wit, and beauty."

Collection Principles
This collection is made up of materials from the physical exhibition, drawing from both the prints & photographs division, and manuscripts division of the Library of Congress. The online exhibition is divided into six pages, based presumably on the different segments of the physical exhibition: biography, space, culture, beauty, furniture, and science.

Object Characteristics
This online exhibition consists of digital images, photographs and manuscripts for the most part. The different thematic pages contain several small jpegs, all of which link to larger versions (around 600 x 600 pixels) when clicked. This website was made a few years ago, using html; there are no fancy flash slide shows or zooming features. It would really be neat to have a slide show function, since that was a major device of the Eameses. Nevertheless, the code is pretty clean, and I didn't come across any broken links.

Metadata
There are captions and descriptions associated with some of the images, as well as the division (Prints & Photo or Manuscripts) from which it originates. The links, though, are to the main page of each, and the file names are not searchable within the LC catalog, even when the "search numbers field" is selected. So, there is no way for a person curious about purchasing reproduction rights or simply linking to the file in the actual catalog description page for the image, rather than through the exhibition to track down the images without extensive searching. This places the burden on LC staff to track the images down for patrons, whereas even simply including the LC call number would have made it far more informative. Likewise, no documentation as to how the images were digitized or any other technical information exists.

Intended Audience
The way the exhibition is constructed and the casual language indicates to me that a general audience was targeted. There are some links to special features for children.