Jesse Saunders Blog #9: Old Sturbridge Village Graphics Database

The Old Sturbridge Village Graphics Database contains a collection of over 1,400 scans done by the living history museum of materials within their collection. This online exhibit is maintained separately from the museum's collection of images of 3 dimensional objects. Old Sturbridge Village is a living history museum in Sturbridge, MA which portrays life in a rural New England town in the 1830's. The museum was born from the artifact collections and history interest of the Well's family of Southbridge, MA, who were vital in initiating the work of the museum in its early years.


Collection Principles
The images exhibited on the OSV Graphics Database are a portion of the museum's total archival image collection. However, there is no indication in the brief information on the website about how the images were selected to be scanned and exhibited. While information on selection is lacking, the images are sectioned into 35 categories ranging from "Agriculture and Horticulture" to "Youth/Courtship & Marriage", many containing fewer than 50 images, yet one holding over 200. The collection was most likely built from the collections of materials from the museums founders, based on the categories previously mentioned, which portray many of the values and activities espoused by the museum.

Object Characteristics
While browsing through the image collection, or on the search results page, images are displayed with thumbnails in sections of 10 per page. After clicking on a particular image, the user is taken to a new window, which displays a slightly larger version of the image, along with the metadata and a link to a tool which allows the users to display the image in a variety of sizes and with various sharpening/editing tools. This page also contains the option to download the full-size image, which is delivered in .jpg format. The downloaded images are quite high-res and the several scans I viewed appeared to be very well done. There is no information on the OSV website regarding how or on what equipment the scans are done or what software was used to do any correction/modification to the images.

Metadata
Each image contains basic, but useful metadata for each image. The metadata fields include: description (generally one sentence), keywords, title, author, publisher, where published, publication year, page, and call number. For letters and business papers, data regarding sender/recipient and date of authorship are also included. In the case of letters, transcripts are generally provided as well.

Intended Audience
As with most of the information on www.osv.org, the image collection would largely be of interest to visitors, or potential visitors, to the museum. Yet with the high profile of OSV in the museum community and the Wells' brothers large collections of 19th century materials, individuals interested in that era would certainly find the collection quite useful, though it is difficult to know how easy a time researchers would have finding the collection if they did not explicitly know of its existence.