Online Description Assignment

I selected collections presented online at Florida Memory, a website resulting from a grant to digitize select collections from the State Library and Archives of Florida. Their mission is to “provide online access to archival resources housed in the State Library and Archives that illustrate significant moments  in the state’s history, offer educational resources… and make available collections for research” (Florida Memory, n.d.). Their photographic collection is a searchable image database of over 176,000 photographs. I would imagine their users are quite diverse, including government agencies, researchers, teachers, students, and casual browsers, but all would be most likely interested in FL history and culture.

Screen captures are sometimes hard to see on the blog, so I decided to just provide the links for the items I  analyzed.

Collection Level Description: http://www.floridamemory.com/photographiccollection/collections/?id=13

For collection level and item level description I focused on the Robert E. Fisher Collection. This collection description is informative and contains a lot of the types of information and content covered in our readings and in class, but it is not without faults and inconsistencies.

Two problems are, unfortunately, the major access points of the title and creator name. In their list of collections, and on the collection page itself, the collection is referred to as the “Robert E. Fisher Collection,” however, under “Title” in the finding aid it is the “Robert Fisher Photographic Collection, 1941-1961.” Fisher is referred to with and without his middle initial inconsistently in this collection level finding aid and in the item level records. I personally think the title with dates and naming it a “photographic” collection is preferable due to its specificity, but either way a consistent naming standard is necessary here. Writing about this collection, or citing an image, is frustrating if you do not know what to call it or how to correctly refer to the photographer.

An additional vocabulary problem at the collection level is the photographs themselves. The one sentence summary/abstract of the collection at the beginning of the page is a great idea, but if I was opening up this aid and read only the first title and that line, I would not know this was a collection of photographs, as it refers only to “images.” The abstract should refer to them as photographs, although it is unclear if they are prints or negatives since each is mentioned in the description below. My guess is that the actual physical collection of 3000 images are photographic negatives, but that the 1200 images online are positive prints (what kind of prints and how, who knows?), but this is only my interpretation and these details about the photographs, including any information on their processes, should be explicit in the collection description.

Besides these faults, the collection description does provide excellent detail in a concise format. The amount of text is easy to read on screen, and extent, date, and geographic location information is provided along with a large number of subject terms for search and access. Given the ability to search the collection by keyword or subject, these terms are useful access points. A brief historical note on Fisher is also helpful, reinforcing the fact that he was a commercial photographer specializing in aerial photography.

Contents List Description: http://www.floridamemory.com/solr-search/results/?q=*:*^10%20%22Robert%20E.%20Fisher%20Collection%22%20AND%20collection%3A%22Florida%20Photographic%20Collection%22&searchbox=1&query=&cid=13&pc=Robert%20E.%20Fisher%20Collection&year=&gallery=0

This link is the records for the photographs if you select “view all” from the collection level description. Two things about these records were immediately confusing and frustrating to me as a user. First, the dates are awful, to put it plainly. I know from the collection description that this collection covers 1941-1961, so if a specific date is unknown then that range should at least be entered. The date as only “19-- “ is pretty lazy I think, and should be unacceptable. I also found the “collection” confusing, as these are listed as being in the Florida Photograph Collection, but also the Robert E. Fisher Collection. From my search I know I am in the REF Collection, any searching or sorting I do from this page in the website is in that collection. It is not helpful to list the larger overarching photographic collection of Florida Memory by name here, and I am not sure why it is present.

In terms of item titles, the first three images alone demonstrate that the photographs either have author-supplied titles or that the archive did not use a standard for titles (as the third is missing location information) and I hope it is the former. However, the titles here, while not consistent, are fairly simple and descriptive, and do represent what one would expect to find in their visual counterparts. This is helped by the presence of the image thumbnails, which is a good feature for users, and it is nice that selecting a title brings you to its more detailed record.

Item Level Description: http://www.floridamemory.com/items/show/166700?cid=13&pc=Robert%20E.%20Fisher%20Collection

I looked at the item record for the photograph “Moped-Jacksonville, Florida.”  I have already discussed the problems with the dates and inconsistent creator name. In contrast with the collection description, the physical descriptions in the item records are all consistent, naming the records “photonegatives,” listing them as black and white, and giving their size. However, in looking at this image online, it is a positive image, and so it is unclear to me what “photonegative” means in this context. Is it describing the physical item (that is my guess) and not the online positive surrogate? This should be explained here or in the collection description. The term “photonegative” is also not from any of the controlled vocabularies we discussed in class, so it is unclear why this local and imprecise term was selected. The “series title” is also confusing, listing the whole collection and also the specific box, folder, and envelope of this item. While it is nice to link back to the collection description, and helpful for context to see where this photograph is located in terms of its physical organization within that collection, I think the term “series title” itself is unnecessary here, especially as there are not actually multiple series within this collection. More appropriate terminology might be “Collection” for the general information, and “Specific location within collection”.

The access terms in these records are excellent and detailed however, as they were at the collection level. Both subject and geographic terms are listed, and from what I can tell they are using the Library of Congress vocabularies for these. In some records the subject and geographic terms do tend to overlap, but I think this extra information is better than too little, especially as there is a subject search and someone might use a geographic term in that and want results.

Album Description: http://www.floridamemory.com/items/show/18049

The REF Collection does not have any albums, so I wanted to see if I could find any in the Florida Memory site. The do have several, mostly in “The General Collection,” their main photographic collection documenting a comprehensive visual history of FL from mid-1800 to the present. One album documented belonged to Harry Holmes, who moved to FL in 1952.

Above is a link to an item level record for a photograph from this album. The record is not clear that it is from an album, actually, but I assume it is as it is contains the same general note about the rescued Holmes album as a number of other records. This record has some similar problems noted earlier (dates, physical description (what is a “photoprint”?)) and some of the same strengths (informative title and subject headings). However, in terms of analyzing this as an album, this description is not adequate. A general note discusses “the album,” but is this photograph a part of it, and if it is, where in the album does it belong? More frustrating, is that there is no easy way to see all of the images from this album in context. You can collect them if you search for the general note about the Holmes family and see what records it is in, but this is clunky and showing the album as a full document, providing context to these images should be a priority for these records.

REFRENCE:

Florida Memory. (n.d.) About Florida Memory. Retrieved from http://www.floridamemory.com/about/