Lauren A Blog 5 - National Park Service Historic Photograph Collection

The National Park Service Historic Photograph Collection includes over two million images of Park architecture, Native American heritage, NPS personnel, roads and transportation, scenic views, and more. Two-thousand of these images are now available online through the website of the Harpers Ferry Center, the NPS's media resource center.

Collection Principles
Visitors to the website are not given any information about why or how the collection is being digitized. Nor are they given any history of the collection or reasons for its existence. Less than .1 percent of the physical collection is available online, but there is no information about how these photographs were selected for digitization and Internet accessibility. The homepage does state that the digital collection includes "the collections of several eminent National Park Service photographers, including Jack Boucher, Arno B. Cammerer, George A. Grant, and Abbie Rowe." Perhaps these images are possibly among the most beautiful or most requested in the NPS Historic Photograph Collection?

Object Characteristics
All of the photographs have been converted to JPEGs of fairly low resolution. Most of the images I looked at were 500-550 x 350-400 pixels. It's just as well that there is no zoom function for the images because no detail would be gained. It's a shame because these photographs are truly amazing, many of them are of spectacular views, but are made dull and shallow by their digitization. The digital objects are not very versatile. If the NPS ever wanted to create a serious digital exhibition or create reproductions from this collection, the images would certainly have to be re-digitized.

Metadata
Each record contains a catalog number and fields for information about the physical object including photographer, date, subject, collection, description of the subject, and description of the object (for example - 5"x7" b/w print). The photographer and date are often unknown for older images. It is possible to search the collection by any of these fields, as well as park site and keyword. I think a timeline of images would be a helpful addition to the website, so researchers could look at time periods in the park history, rather than having to search each individual year. A link to information about "Copyright of Archival Collections" is available on the right side of every page. This essentially says that some items in the collections may be copyrighted but that this is difficult to determine and that the National Parks Service does not own these rights if they do exist. A link to the U.S. Copyright Office web page is then given. I appreciate that they are straightforward about how difficult the law is to interpret regarding archival materials, but I fear that their explanation may cause confusion or fear in visitors and cause them not to use the collection. In the page on Copyright web page the NPS also states that it appreciates visitors' help in identifying photographs that are not properly identified. However, no links or forms are given to do this, either on that page or the individual object pages.

Intended Audience
No statement of intention is given for the photo collection. But the Harpers Ferry Center's mission states "that by employing appropriate media, professionals can interpret the park story for the visiting public in a fashion that is immediate and understandable and a complement to the efforts in the park itself." To this end of promoting the NPS, each individual object page has a short list of links along the right side directing visitors to pages on related parks or photographers. The images chosen for digitization seem to focus mostly on establishing the parks' long history as a part of American identity and as repositories of the nation's natural wonders.