The historical images in the Internet Mission Photography Archive come from Protestant and Catholic missionary collections held at a number of centers in Britain, continental Europe, and North America. The photographs record missionary endeavors and reflect the missionaries’ experience of communities and environments abroad. There are examples of the physical influence the mission presence brought --mission compounds, church and school buildings-- as well as examples of the cultural impact of mission teaching and Western influence, including schools and training programs, Christian practices, and Western technology and fashions. The pictures document indigenous peoples' responses to missions and the history of indigenous churches which are often now a major force in society. They also offer views of landscapes, of cities, and of towns before and in the early stages of modern development. The same cataloging procedures were used for all of the collections. Depending on the research goals, therefore, a person who uses the web site will be able to search through the images provided by one, several, or all of the collections, structuring the search and sorting the results according to the categories, descriptors, and keywords under which the images were cataloged as they were added to the database. Not all pictures will be accompanied by the same depth of documentation, but the goal is to include an original caption, the photographer’s name, and the time, place, occasion, and subject of the picture. Any other information that is available, including textual descriptions, has also been incorporated, making it possible to employ more refined descriptive and thematic searches. Although the language of the website is English, some descriptive information on the photographs is entered in the original language, so that searching on Norwegian or German terms can also yield useful results. This project is supported by a grant from the Getty Grant Program. It is a pilot project, intended to establish a set of procedures for cataloging and disseminating these visual resources that will have wide future applicability. Anyone interested in what we offer here should also consult the online photography collection of the Basel Mission, a pioneering accomplishment in digital archiving from which our work has benefited substantially. The proliferation of Christian missionary societies devoted to overseas evangelism was one of the most important social movements of the nineteenth century. By the middle of that century, many national Protestant denominations had established such organizations. In the Catholic Church, old mission orders were re-invigorated and many new ones founded, again with a strongly national reference. By World War I, male and female missionaries were an established presence wherever Western influence had penetrated, sometimes as participants, sometimes as antagonists, and almost always as alert observers of the global political and economic transformations of the period. For reasons that were both practical and religious, missionaries were dedicated correspondents, diarists, and record keepers. The surviving text-based archives of these communications have long been used by scholars to reconstruct missionaries’ actions, trace the evolution of their thinking, map the matrix of their relations with local societies, and assess their impact as agents of Western contact with the rest of the world. The archives are also known as often fascinating sources for indigenous political, social and economic history in the area where the missionaries were active. With the advent of photography, missionaries also began to compile a visual record of their activities. It is known that in the 1850s some missionaries were creating daguerrotypes and calotypes in the regions where they worked, though few of these images have survived in a photographic form. As more robust and portable cameras became available, and as missionary societies became aware of photography's educational and fund-raising potential, collections began to grow. A number of missionary societies were encouraging photography in the wet-plate collodium era (1860s and 1870s). But the numbers of missionary photographers and photographs grew exponentially once factory-made negatives became available in the 1880s and from then on cameras became lighter and easier to use. Most missionary societies, or the libraries that hold their archives, have accumulations of pictures in various formats, ranging from a few musty, uncataloged boxes or albums at one end of the scale to carefully preserved, well organized, and professionally cataloged collections numbering in the hundreds of thousands of images at the other. These historical photographs represent an important scholarly resource, but their usefulness to date has been limited by their unorganized state and inaccessibility, distributed as they are across many separate mission repositories. How many photographs exist is unknown, but in the aggregate there are certainly millions, accumulated over the course of a century and a half by scores of separate organizations and individuals. We have not undertaken to catalog and digitize that mass of photographs in anything like its entirety. Instead, we have concentrated on selections of images from just six centers, chosen because of the importance and quality of their collections and the skill of their professional archive staffs. Given our limited resources, we have made the strategic decision to stress depth over breadth in our selections and therefore have not attempted to capture all of a mission’s geographic range in our database. Instead we have tended to concentrate on the strongest and best-organized parts of the collections, where we have attempted to include the “thickest” series of pictures, such as those produced by a particularly prolific and skilled photographer or identified with a particularly important place, cast of characters, or set of historical events. The sampling that resulted from this process is strongest on parts of China and Africa, Madagascar, and Papua New Guinea. It is not representative of other regions of the world. It must be noted, however, that the architecture of IMPA allows, indeed assumes, expansion, and in time the geographic and chronological representation in the database will increase, as will the denominational and confessional variety of the missions included. The Moravian Church (Die Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine), established in 1722, was the first Protestant missionary society to send its agents to West and South Africa. Because of its location in what was formerly East Germany, the historically important collection in the Unitätsarchiv in Herrnhut has hitherto received little attention from those interested in Africa. Our selection of photographs focuses on two missionary fields in Africa: 'Nyasa', in what is now southern Tanzania, and 'South Africa West', the area just outside Cape Town. In both cases the photographs date almost entirely from the period 1890-1940, with the peak lying in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The Leipzig Mission (Evangelisch-Lutherisches Missionswerk Leipzig), founded in 1836, has been and still is active principally in East Africa, India, and Papua-New Guinea. The archive in Leipzig possesses some 20,000 photos, including about 3,500 from Northeast Tanzania, notably Kilimanjaro, Arusha and Pare. For IMPA we have concentrated on the photographs supplied by the missionaries Wilhelm Guth (who worked mainly in Pare, 1913-17 and 1927-38) and Leonhard Blumer (active mainly in Arusha, 1912-13 and 1924-26). In addition we have included a few colored postcards published by the Mission, probably before World War One. The Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America, Inc. (Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers) was established in 1911 at Maryknoll, New York and sent its first missionaries to China in 1918. The photographic archive, established to support The Field Afar magazine and later Maryknoll, contains between 1 and 1.5 million prints, lantern slides, glass negatives, and slides that capture mission activities in 38 different countries. The Maryknoll Mission Archives was established as a collaborative venture in 1990 to care for the records and images of the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, Maryknoll Sisters and the Maryknoll Lay Missioners. For IMPA, we have confined our selection to the China series of images dated 1912-1945. The photograph collection of the Norwegian Missionary Society in Stavanger is extensive, well preserved, and among the best-organized and -cataloged collections that exist. Overall, it comprises approximately 100,000 items, including photograph albums, glass plate negatives, and lantern slides, representing regions as diverse as South Africa (Natal and Zululand), Madagascar, China (Hunan, Hong Kong), Cameroon (Adamawa), Japan, Taiwan, and Ethiopia. For IMPA, we have assembled pictures from three regions: Madagascar (from the period 1890 to 1920), South Africa (taken between 1866 and 1940), and Cameroon (taken between 1925 and 1950). The selection from the 25,000 prints held in the missionary society collections at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) is a representative sample of images from Africa, China, the Caribbean, Madagascar, South India, and Papua-New Guinea. The photographs come from the collections of the Council for World Mission (formerly the London Missionary Society), the Methodist Missionary Society, and the China Inland Mission (now the Overseas Missionary Fellowship). Some of the photographs were taken by missionary workers in the field, such as the lay mission worker, John Parrett (1841-1918) who served as a printer for the London Missionary Society in Madagascar from 1862 to 1885 and Rev. Harry Moore Dauncey (1863-1932) who served with the L.M.S. in Papua New Guinea, mainly in the Delena district, for forty years from 1888 to 1928. There are also images collected by missionaries whilst overseas, such as the collection of fine albumen prints of China in the early 1860s taken by an unknown Russian photographer. The archival and manuscript collections of the Yale University Divinity School Day Missions Library include several thousand photographs documenting missionary and educational work in China from the late 19th century to 1950. Photographs in the archives of the United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia focus on the work of the thirteen colleges and universities founded by Protestant mission agencies in China. Photographs in the personal papers of missionaries, who served under a variety of agencies in numerous provinces, provide a broad-based view of the spectrum of Protestant mission work in China. Medical, educational, and evangelistic endeavors are documented, as well as famine relief, rural reconstruction, athletics, and other aspects of the lives and work of American and British missionaries, and their Chinese students and colleagues. The individual items in these collections cover a wide range in terms of the level at which they have been cataloged and the accessibility of metadata, that is, information about the content and circumstances under which an image was captured (photographer, time and place, persons and events depicted), and accompanying textual information (such as captions, descriptions, and other associated documents). We have used a common data-entry template based on Dublin Core for all of the collections, assuring that essentially the same categories of data are entered in the same format for each photograph. Inevitably, however, the database contains some photographs with only the minimally acceptable cataloging information as well as photographs for which a great deal of associated information is available. We have included pictures in the less well-documented category because we know from experience that scholars often bring their own special knowledge to the assessment of a photograph. It is better for an interesting picture to be available for scrutiny, even if it is less than optimally documented, on the assumption that viewers might be able to contribute information that we can consider for incorporation into the electronic record. For this purpose, each image contains a link to a page where viewer comments can be entered. The work that went into the creation of this website was shared by: Lisa Cole, School of Oriental and African Studies Matt Gainer, University of Southern California Nils Kristian Hoeimyr, Norwegian Missionary Society Nava Herman, University of Southern California Paul Jenkins, University of Basel Samantha Johnson, School of Oriental and African Studies Adam Jones, University of Leipzig Judith Kreitzer, Maryknoll Mission Archives Jon Miller, University of Southern California Ellen Pierce, Maryknoll Mission Archives Christina Schmidt, University of Leipzig R. Wayne Shoaf, University of Southern California Rosemary Seton, School of Oriental and African Studies Martha Lund Smalley, Yale University Divinity School Dennis Smith, University of Southern California Mike Walsh, Maryknoll Mission Archives