Katie R - Blog 9 - Picturing the Cayuse, Walla Walla, and Umatilla Tribes

This collection of Thomas Moorhouse's photographs is owned by the University of Oregon, and working with the Tamástslikt Cultural Institute, some of the images have been digitized to create Picturing the Cayuse, Walla Walla, and Umatilla Tribes. The project was funded by the Northwest Academic Computing Consortium.

Collecting Principles:
The University of Oregon was interested in making Moorhouse's images from the late 19th Century available to the native population pictured as a way to improve accessibility and let the tribes tell their own stories. Aware of the issues surrounding a white photographer capturing the past of the tribes, U of O's aim is to provide a "culturally balanced context." The website notes that "one of the primary objectives is to provide the tribal people the opportunity to describe their cultural record in their own words by creating descriptions of images from the Moorhouse collection." As for selecting from the 2,600 images, "representatives from TCI chose images for inclusion in the digital library collection in consultation with UO Libraries Special Collections & University Archives staff."

Object Characteristics:
Scanned from glass plate negatives, the images online are "derivative image files, including compressed 125 DPI JPEG images for Web display and thumbnail GIF images for browsing." The site does not elaborate on the original file type, but I will guess a TIFF. OU and TCI have both included metadata descriptions, which lead to expanded searching possibilities. Also, because the images come straight from glass negatives, the quality of detail is amazing. Photographs from this period are usually degraded in some way, from physical abrasions to chemical instability, but the negatives are in excellent condition and offer more information that most photos.


Metadata:
UO used DublinCore standards for the metadata which includes "subject description, content description, and supplied titles."and uses ContentDM framework. The project also worked with Metadata Implementation Group to combine information for the multiple descriptions from both TCI and UO. This is a really interesting way to describe the images, and shows a commitment on the part of UO to work with the tribal community.


Intended Audience:
The project description explicitly lays out the audience: "The project makes a selection of images from the UO Libraries’ Moorhouse photograph collection available online in a culturally balanced context for use by the TCI, the people it serves, the University of Oregon community, and the general public. One of the primary objectives is to provide the tribal people the opportunity to describe their cultural record in their own words by creating descriptions of images from the Moorhouse collection." This collection should also be a good example of an institution working with the community to make interesting and fragile collections accessible.