|
|
|
Mission Days Live Again, Digitally
If a picture paints a thousand words, then these 6,000 digitally preserved images of California’s pioneers days paint … oh, you do the math.
|
|
|
|
FOR THOSE WHO only associate California with moving pictures, USC librarians have an eye-opener: more than 6,000 precious glass negatives from the California Historical Society photographic collection, now available online through the efforts of USC Libraries.
The photos, taken during the period 1860-1920, document the entire panorama of Southern California life. Early ones reveal a land of missions, cattle and Native American and Mexican dwellers. Later ones unfold a tale of interurban electric railways, automobiles and the American street scene of the early 20th century.
“This is a major resource for anyone interested in the visual history of Southern California,” says librarian R. Wayne Shoaf, who headed the four-year effort of making digital copies of the collection.
MOST OF THE glass-plate images come from the collection of photo-grapher C.C. Pierce, a Midwesterner who opened a studio in Los Angeles in 1886 and developed a passion for documenting the changing Southwest. Both his own photographs and those he collec-ted, however, were in the format of glass plates.
These originals are now almost impossible to use, according to Shoaf. To view them physically, researchers must flip through the images one by one, risking damage to the plates.
In their digital form, however, the plates are not only electronically accessible but searchable in USC’s library catalog under “metadata” – detailed written descriptions of each image (library. usc.edu/uhtbin/ cgisirsi/0/0/55/30063).
The searcher can enter a word (try “mission” or “automobile”) and locate, view and even download and print corres-ponding images immediately.
Much more work remains to be done. The California Historical Society photo collection that now resides in USC’s archives consists of more than 23,000 images, of which Pierce’s 6,000 glass negatives are only a part. Shoaf estimates the digitizing and indexing of the remaining images may take another three years.
Further major photographic collections also beckon. USC holds the entire photography morgue of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner newspaper, and the files of Dick Whittington, a highly active Los Angeles commercial photographer of the 1920s through the postwar period.
“We have enough to keep us busy for a while,” Shoaf says.
|
