Lauren Blog 7 - Center for Civil War Photography Stereo Cards

The Center for Civil War Photography is a non-profit organization that creates physical and digital exhibits using images from individual private collections and the public domain.

I set out to write this blog about the Center's Digital Archive Project, which, as described on the website, sets out to digitally secure, preserve, organize, create a database of, and make available online every image pertaining to the American Civil War. The archive will include all formats of photography as well as select sketches, drawings, woodcuts and engravings. You'll notice I say "will" because, as I was disappointed to learn, this project has not been completed. It's start and expected completion dates are unclear. So I've decided to consider the 3D Photographs Exhibit, one of two online exhibits, get a handle on how the archives database might improve over their current online materials.

Collection Principles
This exhibit is a selection of Civil War stereo views from the collection of Bob Zeller. Its purpose seems simply to let people know that such images exist and to let them look at civil war images in a new way. No overview is given of the history of stereo images or how they were traditionally viewed.

Object Characteristics
Many of the stereo images here were featured in a book called The Civil War In Depth. Owners of this book are instructed to use its viewer to look at the images in 3D. But I'm guessing that quite a lot of people do not own this book and thus just see two very similar photographs side-by-side. The exhibit consists of 22 thumbnails of stereo cards with short description. Clicking one of these takes you to two medium-sized images (500 x 249 pixels) of low resolution, one of the front of the stereocard and one of the back.

Metadata
For each image, there is a paragraph of historical narrative. No further information is given about the physical artifact. No metadata is given about the digital images.

Intended Audience
Largely, the websites seems aimed at increasing awareness about the vast visual resources that exist from the civil war era. The homepage points out that "new photographic finds from our nation's greatest conflict are still being made on a regular basis. Nearly every Civil War soldier had his photograph taken by one of the more than 5,000 American photographers active at the time, and a select group of documentary photographers took thousands of images on the battlefields and in the army camps, often in 3D." The intent here seems to be to show people what images are available to them and to increase preservation of these images.

Based on the limited resources currently available from CCWP, I really hope they follow through on the goals for their digitization project, which includes metadata creation, high resolution files, a searchable database and an online reference library. These images really are amazing, but they deserve to be high resolution and easily accessible. However, since the CCWP will be pulling these images from various private and public collections, some probably already in digital form, it seems unlikely that they will be able to set image standards.