Early photography resources

The January 2009 issue of College & Research Libraries News contains a fantastic article, Uncapping the lens : the history of early photography by Ellen Bahr. (Write down the rest of the citation, since the ALA website is notorious for changing its links & the difficulty of navigating it: C&RL News, Jan. 2009, v.70, no.1, p. 32-35. This way, you can always borrow the article via interlibrary loan!)

The article contains a listing of photography sites of interest to anyone involved with any aspect of early photography--even including late 20th century photography processes. The print article is a little easier to scan than the online version; major sections include:

• Overviews
  
• Timelines
  
• Overviews of photographic processes
  
• Individual photographic processes
  
• Materials and workshops
  
• Podcasts
  
• Discussion lists
  
• Organizations
  
• Preservation
  
• Portals
  
• Exhibition catalogs
  
• Searchable image collections
  
• Historians
  

Many thanks to my colleague, Keri Koehler, for passing this issue on to me.

Happy birthday, Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin was born on this day, February 12, 1809. Of the sites celebrating this 200th anniversary of his birth, my favorites include:

• The Dispersal of Darwin which will soon migrate to a new site
  
• Blog for Darwin
  
• And Darwin 200 (from the Natural History Museum, U.K.)
  

I'm going to celebrate by watching Professor Richard Dawkins on Darwin.

Lecture: Preserving the Free China

The Friends of the San Francisco Maritime Museum Library send along this lecture announcement:

Preserving the Free China
Saturday, February 14, 2009, 6:00 p.m. In the Maritime Library, Building E, Fort Mason Center. Donation:$5($4 Library Friends and SFMNPA) Reservations: 415-561-7040 or melani_van_petten@partner.nps.gov

San Francisco Maritime NHP’s John Muir will discuss the effort to preserve the historic Chinese junk Free China, which sailed across the Pacific to San Francisco in 1955, manned by a crew of power boat fishermen who had never sailed before.

TIA: This is the library where I work.

BibliOdyssey

Our friends at Casco Bay Boaters have sent along, and are profiling, a wonderful blog, BiblioOdyssey. The images related to maritime history are few but beautiful, such as the gorgeous Book of Eclipses that Casco Bay Boaters found there.

Do you have feedback for nmmimages.com?

If you missed it, Douglas McCarthy, Picture Library Manager at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, took the time to post a comment on my nmmimages.com post that is so thoughtful that I wanted to give it its own post. (Those of you who saw this already in the comments to the previous post can move on!) He provides his contact information, so if you have feedback on the site, please send it along--nmmimages.com has such potential that it would be wonderful if the user community responds to the staff's openness for comments.

I'm delighted to hear that I was wrong about the lack of searching instructions; Douglas very kindly points out their location, under the "Help" menu, and here's a direct link.

And do check out the Help section--the picture there is fantastic. I want a pair of sunglasses like the woman in the black & white print dress is wearing.

Douglas McCarthy's post:

Hi there

Thanks for featuring our new website and for your comments - this kind of feedback is invaluable. I am the Picture Library Manager at the NMM and have developed nmmimages.com from conception to launch over the last 14 months.

If I may respond to your points in order:

1) a "switch-off slideshow" button for slower connections is a great idea I'll investigate.

2) content: another good point made here. NMM has developed several on-line catalogues since the internet was born, featuring a variety of content presented in different ways. With nmmimages.com, we're trying to present concisely and consistently in terms of caption length and format, for example. This takes longer (we spent 3 months editing 15,000 captions last summer!) but will be worthwhile, I feel.

3) search: this is an area we're working on and improvements will come during 2009, such as keywording. The site does offer phrase (and other flexible) searching. The 'how to' guide on this is in the 'Help' area, but I'll look at making this more prominent.

4) Google is king and likely to remain so!

We have an exciting plan of development for the site, so please keep an eye out for new collections and features this year.

Do feel free to reply here or email me (douglas.mccarthy@nmmimages.com) with further comments if you wish.

Best regards

Douglas McCarthy
Picture Library Manager
National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London

Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition

The new Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition Digital Collection from the Seattle Public Library Special Collections is a searcher's dream.

Interested in waterfront images? In the search box, enter: waterfront
You may be puzzled by the search results--a bunch of digitized books--but select Argus, A.Y.P. ed. and you'll be taken directly to p. 51 with images entitled, "Sections of the Seattle waterfront." Yes--it searches within the digitized texts & takes you directly to the location of your search term in the retrieved item. I love that.

There are many items there of interest to the maritime and naval researcher, and it's a wonderful snapshot of the time. And the search interface makes it easy for the specialized researcher to explore.

Reference Extract

I'm watching Planning Reference Extract with interest. According to their site:

Reference Extract is envisioned as a web search engine, like Google, Yahoo and MSN. However, unlike other search engines, Reference Extracts will be built for maximum credibility by relying on the expertise and credibility judgments of librarians from around the globe. Users will enter a search term and get results weighted towards sites most often referred to by librarians at institutions such as the Library of Congress, the University of Washington, the State of Maryland, and over 1,400 libraries worldwide.

I wonder how it will differ from one of my favorite sites, The Librarian's Index to the Internet, which describes itself as:

Librarians' Internet Index (LII) is a publicly-funded website and weekly newsletter serving California, the nation, and the world...You can also search and browse our website for the best of the Web. We have over 20,000 entries, also maintained by our librarians and organized into 14 main topics and nearly 300 related topics.

Librarians building a searchable resource of credible sites. Such a good idea that LII began doing it in 1990 as a Gopher bookmark file. (Remember Gopher?) In the current climate, they keep going, despite budget cuts. I wonder now what the future of this valuable, almost 20-year-old resource will be?

nmmimages.com

The new Picture Library website from the National Maritime Museum (Greenwich) makes it much easier to find their images from remote locations than it used to be--some images, if you have a fast internet connection. The home page will load a horizontally scrolling row of images without the option to skip it, so if you have a slow connection, you may want to go directly to the subject & category search page or to featured collections. (I accessed the site on a fairly fast network, and grew impatient waiting for the home page to load through the course of my searching.) The site has a useful FAQ broadly outlining policies, but doesn't address what is on this site in comparison to the digital collections previously made available over the web and currently made available on other sites.

Browsing, I saw lovely photographs, objects, paintings--a wide range of items that have been imaged. When I went to the search page, however, and entered this search in the caption search box: "cat head"
my search retrieved one image, a portrait of Captain Sir Charles Hamilton. Apparently, this text is responsible for responding to my phrase search:

This half-length portrait in kit-cat format shows the sitter with his head turned to the right.

Since the FAQ doesn't include advice on constructing search terms, I'm inferring that they don't offer phrase searching. I then tried various terms and variations. I was hoping to find images that I had found through their website before, e.g., "PAD8643 Gaff, Cat Head, Driver Boom, Bow Sprit," a watercolor--but I didn't find it on nmmimages.

It is a great website. On a fast connection, it's easy to navigate, and if you see something you like, there is a link at the bottom directly to their print sales. But I'm not sure how useful the site is for the serious researcher--there are clearly more images available on the main NMM website, but how many more? We don't know. And images that are on the NMM Flickr site are also not appearing on nmmimages (when I looked).

The casual user, or pleasure browser, might enjoy nmmimages, but the casual user might discover more NMM images through a Google Images search by including the phrase "national maritime museum"--I know I did.

Restrained

Ryan Harper has posted a beautiful photo of his on website, Ryanharperphotography.com,, in the blog entry entitled Restrained. He took this lovely photo of chains at SF Maritime NHP (TIA: where I work), and it won first place at the Wasatch Camera Club's advanced open division.

200 Jobs

On January 6, 2009, the Wall Street Journal published, Doing the Math to Find the Good Jobs: Mathematicians Land Top Spot in New Ranking of Best and Worst Occupations in the U.S. (I read about this on gCaptain's excellent weekly review, Maritime Monday.)

Interestingly, librarian appears as no. 43 of the top 200 jobs, beat out by Historian at no. 7. Museum Curator? Down at no. 66. Bookbinder appears at no. 83, and Photographic Process Worker at no. 90. (Are you still doing analog photographic reproduction at your museum?) Author? No. 93, but ahead of Photographer at no. 125, and Recreation Worker at no. 131.

As for the maritime trades, Stevedore makes an appearance at no. 175, and Seaman at no. 197. The criteria that go in to the ratings include: work environment, physical demands, stress, income, and hours per week. Of course, the intangibles are omitted. I don't think they asked people in the professions if they loved what they do.

Your Call Radio

Another favorite radio program of mine is KALW's locally-produced Your Call Radio. Several recent programs address issues of interest to the maritime and the museum world, and are a pleasure to listen to. The hosts are skilled at fostering interesting discussions while ensuring that the experts share background information necessary to understanding the issues. It's a live, call-in show, but, again, the hosts consistently foster an environment of civil discussion. If you like the shows below, consider tuning in--and participating. (A live stream is available via KALW's Listen Live page, and the show is broadcast Monday through Friday between 11:00 AM and noon, Pacific Time.

• Commons: Who owns human cultural heritage? Guests: McGuire Gibson, Professor in the Oriental Institute and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at University of Chicago, and
  Sharon Waxman, journalist and author of Loot: The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World.
  
• What can we learn from the transformation of our oceans? Guest: Sylvia Earle, named a living legend by the Library of Congress, Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society, and author of Ocean: An Illustrated Atlas.
  
• Global commons--Whales & sharks. Guests: Guests: David McGuire, conservation filmmaker, a field associate of the California Academy of Sciences and a shark advocate; Douglas Long, Chief Curator, Natural Sciences at Oakland Museum of California and formerly chair of the Department of Ornithology and Mammalogy at the California Academy of Sciences, currently teaching in the Department of Biology at Saint Mary's College in Moraga; and, Stan Minasian, a naturalist with the Oceanic Society.
  

What Lies Beneath

The BBC's documentary series, The Changing World, aired another excellent program, What Lies Beneath. I heard it via my local NPR station, KALW (of which I'm an enthusiastic member) and the program was so good that I listened to it a second time.

Win Scutt, an archaeologist and broadcaster, is engaging and educational. This program is a must for anyone with any interest in underwater archaeology, and would even be interesting to land-archaeologists, as Scutt addresses the issues of the shifting shore over time. In many places, what was once land is now underwater, and the frontiers of many archaeological fields lie submerged.

For those intimately involved with the field, and confronting the current issues of law, ethics, and unprecedented access to sites due to advances in technology, it would also be worth a listen--this documentary brings these issues into the mainstream media and might well influence how they are discussed in the future.

Lecture: Balclutha in the movies

The Friends of the San Francisco Maritime Museum Library send along this lecture announcement:

Balclutha in the Movies
Saturday, January 10, 2009, 6:00 p.m. In the Maritime Library, Building E, Fort Mason Center. Donation:$5($4 Library Friends and SFMNPA) Reservations: 415-561-7040 or melani_van_petten@partner.nps.gov

Park Ranger Debbie Grace will briefly tell the story of Balcutha’s movie career, including Mutiny on the Bounty, with Clark Gable. Her introduction will be followed by a showing of Souls At Sea, a rousing story of the slave trade in the 1850’s. The movie stars the Star of Finland as the William Brown, and includes the Star of Alaska (ex-Balclutha) in a supporting role. Gary Cooper and George Raft are also featured.

TIA: This is the library where I work.

Nautical paper plates of yesteryear

"Paper plate ad, couple at dock," from George Eastman House's Flickr photostream.

More information on the George Eastman House photography collection is available at their website.

Sea Eagles

They may be re-introduced to England, according to a recent article in ScienceDaily. The decision is still pending, but should be made in 2009.

Should the cry of the sea eagles be heard again over England's cliffs, the words of the poet of The Seafarer will come to life:
Storms there beat the stony cliffs,
where the tern spoke,
icy-feathered;
always the eagle cried at it,
dewy-feathered;
no cheerful kinsmen
can comfort
the poor soul.

Archaeoastronomy

The Library of Congress has posted a new Tracer Bullet (a "pathfinder," for all you librarians out there) on Archaeoastronomy. It's a fascinating discipline, involving history, archeology, anthropology, etc. From the Tracer Bullet:

Archaeoastronomy is the interdisciplinary study of prehistoric, ancient, and traditional astronomies within their cultural context. Its sources include both written and archaeological remains and it embraces calendrics, practical observation, sky lore, celestial myth, and more. Its true scope establishes it as an "anthropology of astronomy."

How does this relate to maritime history? Well, the only photo included is The Antikythera Mechanism, discovered on a sunken Greek ship.

Cruise Travel & Popular Science

When I heard that Google Book Search was adding magazines, I was very happy to find Thomas Gruber's list of titles. Of particular interest to the maritime world:

• Cruise Travel Magazine: Currently, there are issues from 1970 on.
  
• Popular Science Monthly: Currently, there are issues from 1870 on. Check out the article by Harry Fielding Reid from Jan. 1910, "How could an explorer find the pole?" or the articles on the centenary of Darwin's birth that speculate on his place in future biology in the same issue.
  

Searching is via the usual Google Books interface, books.google.com, and when you retrieve a magazine article, the screen will often say things like, "Read this book." There is searching help available just for the magazines, which says:

Once you've found a magazine that interests you, you can browse other issues of that magazine from the "About this magazine" page. Click on the "About this magazine" link at the top left of the screen, and scroll down to the section marked "Browse all issues." You can then explore different issues of the magazine by clicking on a decade that interests you, and then scrolling through the individual issues from that time.

However I didn't find the "Browse all issues" displayed consistently--perhaps Google's not sure which "books" are "magazines."

The Naval History Society Collection, 1721-1995

Celia Hartmann, Project Archivist, Naval History Society Collection at the New-York Historical Society has sent along exciting news:

The New-York Historical Society has made available the finding aid for its newly processed Naval History Society Collection. You can find it at http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/nyhs/NHSColl.html
where it is fully searchable.

The Collection consists of 53 individual collections, many named for renowned naval officers or vessels. These include correspondence, letterbooks, journals and diaries, lectures, essays, account books, biographical writings, genealogical information, scrapbooks, orders, notes, articles and clippings, photographs, manuscripts, and ships' logs, as well as the organizational records and correspondence of the Naval History Society itself.

The majority of the collections document American naval engagements and commercial maritime pursuits, personalities, and vessels; a few collections of British and French documents are included. The Collection as a whole provides primary sources on American naval involvement in hostilities from the American Revolution to the Spanish American War, as well as routine commercial and naval shipboard life, naval design, navigation, education and officer training. The Society's records document the founding, management, and activities of a collecting and publishing organization in the first third of the 20th century.

Processing of the Collection was made possible by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.

The finding aid is a thing of beauty; easy to navigate, each of the series is linked to the relevant container list. Related material is covered, and under "Access restrictions," it's noted that microfilms of portions of the collection are available via interlibrary loan! The access points are easily browsed, and also hyperlinked, covering names, subjects, and even document types.

The only item that seems missing in the finding aid is a link for further information, so researchers take note: Celia will be there to answer questions until the end of the month. After that, contact the reference staff at the New York Historical Society. (If their website is unavailable, try phoning 212-873-3400.)

ETA: The finding aid now has a link for further information: select List of Finding Aids to see more finding aids, a link to the institution's home, etc. (Feb. 25, 2009)

Old magazine articles

Our friends at the Casco Bay Boaters Blog have sent along a fantastic link to the OldMagazineArticles.com. There is a lot there of maritime interest; the browse list on the home page includes links to Titanic articles and U.S. Navy uniform articles. You can also search by keywords, and the resulting list of articles includes long summaries that make it easy to select a pertinent resource. The articles I viewed were all Adobe Acrobat .pdf files, preserving the look of the original hardcopy, and many had links to relevant film clips.

The site is also good for popular coverage of related topics: business, arts, world affairs, etc. It's not a comprehensive collection, but a very nice selection.

Limelight on research for historical fiction

Julian Stockwin's article, Using the Internet in writing historical fiction has some great websites of interest to maritime authors and researchers. A feature of Limelight from Intute: Arts & Humanities, the article lists resources not only of use in maritime history research, but some leads for aspiring authors on such topics as how to submit a manuscript to a literary agent.

And if you haven't explored Intute: Arts & Humanities, set aside some time to head over there. It's amazingly well-organized and easy to use, and includes fascinating blog. (Don't miss the recent entry on Intute's hosting of the Port database.)