Collection Principles
Since Prokudin-Gorskii's work existed only as glass plate negatives the digitization serves two preservation purposes: recreating color images that reproduce how the negatives were projected using colored lights have been scanned and making the images available to the public, many of them for the first time. Although it isn't stated outright on the site, through searching the collection database, it seems that the collection of color plates, as well as Prokudin-Gorskii's albums of reference photographs, have been digitized and put online in their entirety. Some of these images have been cropped and are highlighted in this exhibition.
Object Characteristics
The glass plates have been scanned and converted to jpegs with a height of 704 pixels. The exhibition divides these images into categories by subject (architecture, ethnic diversity, transportation and people at work).
Metadata
Each image is accompanied by historical background information, title, date, a link to the holding department (which for all of the images is the prints and photographic division) and the LC id. There's also a section about the photographer and his work and a detailed section on how color images are created from three different black and white glass plate negatives (really cool!!). So there's lots of metadata about the glass plate and lots of information on how the digitization happened, but unfortunately no metadata about the digital object. Though this can all be found with minimal effort by searching the collection for an object of interest.
Intended Audience
People who have previously been unable to see these images as they were originally intended (a.k.a. everyone).
1 comment:
Most of the photos in the collection are still in black and white; anyone who wants to try their hand at compositing can find fairly detailed instructions at http://www.najakito.com/~john/Tutorials/
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