From the past to the future: historic photography illustrates the new media

February 14, 2008

Studio portrait of a seated man with a moustache in a sweater, vest, and suit coat. Image created by Charles J. Van Schaick and part of the images in Michael Lesy's 1973 book Wisconsin Death Trip.

One of the aspects I find more interesting about photography is its place in history. The role that it plays to communicate -and in some cases to influence- events of ordinary life, moments that define who we are and what we do in this world. I believe that the relevance of photography remains a critical defining factor of history today -even when we are saturated of visual information-, but it is certain that photography is the most valuable visual record we have from our past century.

Until recently, most of the historical collections of photography have been out of our reach or have been difficult to access. But the times are changing and this is very significant. The impact of photography is at large dependent on the distribution, and this is even more important for photography with historical value.

It is therefore great news that several historical societies are starting to distribute their photographic collections using Web 2.0 technologies. We learned about the Library of Congress (U.S.A.) uploading collections of their images into Flickr, I referred yesterday to the website Shorpy, and I like here to introduce the activities that the Wisconsin Historical Society is taking to distribute their images using a range of web 2.0 technologies.

Driven at large by the effort of Andy Adams, the creator and editor of the great site Flak Photo, this historical society is now using e-mail, Flickr, eBay and RSS feeds, to distribute their collection. In addition, Andy is planning to go even further and develop a site that will allow for a nice visual experience of these historical images, a reflection of what he learned developing Flak Photo. I expect great things from his work.

I like to highlight one of the series of images that they have uploaded into Flikr. These are the pictures from Michael Lesy's 1973 book Wisconsin Death Trip (a precious book and a movie), which features photographs from the Charles Van Schaick collection, the entirely of which is housed at the WHS Archives.

I think this is very significant and I have to applaud the effort that people like Andy Adams are doing to not only distribute contemporary photography but also historical images that define our history.

Here below Andy shares with us more details on the effort he is leading at the Wisconsin Historical Society.

Wisconsin Historical Society Digital Lab

WHS Images / Digital Outreach

The visual materials in the WHS Archives collections document many aspects of the social, economic and political history of Wisconsin and the Upper Midwest. In addition to holdings in regional history, our collections emphasize a national focus in the areas of nineteenth-century exploration, Native Americans, mass communications, and social action movements, including labor and civil rights. Currently, 34,000 images—less than 2% of our total visual materials collections—are available online, but we continue to add hundreds of new items to our image database each month.

About WHS Images

Web 2.0 Technologies

The Wisconsin Historical Society is actively collecting, digitizing and providing access to a broad range of visual materials and making them available to an international audience of online users. The WHS Images digital lab aims to generate awareness about the work we do in the Visual Materials / Library-Archives Division and to maximize discoverability of historical images available in our online image database for people who enjoy images but might not visit the WHS website.

We believe that producing accessible new media portals to the collections are key to promoting the image collections and the reproduction services our lab provides. This year, we’ve implemented a combination of email updates, RSS and social media to promote the collections and grow our audience. To that end, we’ve developed a variety of Web 2.0 concepts, including:

Email Updates

The WHS Images Update is an email newsletter produced by the Wisconsin Historical Society digital lab. Each monthly update features gallery exhibits drawn from the visual materials collections as well as new additions to Wisconsin Historical Images (WHI), our online image database. The monthly dispatch has been useful in providing various points of entry to our online image database with via the navigational usability of a web magazine.

Online Image Database RSS Feed

One of the fun features of WHI is an RSS feed that publishes new image database additions to the Internet and links each to its respective entry online—users can subscribe using their feedreader and see the collections that we’ve digitized in real time.

Flickr

In the summer of 2007 we began contributing images from our online collections to the international Flickr community—since then, we’ve uploaded approximately 500 images, participate in over 40 groups and the images have been viewed by nearly 60,000 users. We’re looking forward to further expanding our involvement with Flickr in 2008.

eBay

The WHS Images digital lab produces quality giclée print reproductions made from high resolution scans of original photo negatives and prints from the Wisconsin Historical Society Archives, so we’ve experimented with using eBay sales tools to connect with image enthusiasts and sell inkjet reproduction prints of items from our holdings. All print sale proceeds directly benefit the acquisition, preservation and maintenance of the physical and online collections.

Wikipedia

We’ve begun to contribute to the public experience on Wikipedia, too—WHS Images has been “illustrating” existing entries with images from our collections as well as providing links to featured galleries and online content that highlight the subject of an entry, a few examples include:

H. H. Bennett

Myles Horton

Online Archival Exhibitions

WHS Images connects its audience to the collections through an image experience published online or in print. Our users appreciate the experience of exploring our online image collections, so in response we began to produce monthly “featured gallery” exhibitions online.

Highlights from our gallery archive include:

Miguel Garcia-Guzman

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