Victorian Studio Portrait Photo Collection

The Victorian Studio Portrait Photograph Collection, part of the University of Missouri Digital Library, contains images of 229 photographs from the mid-19th-early 20th centuries. All of these are portraits, as the name of the project implies, most of them taken in Missouri and Kansas. Frustratingly, the website does not explicitly state where the photos are from. It appears that this project originated from the University of Missouri at Kansas City Library, so I will assume that all of the photographs are from their collection. The home page for the collection describes the formats as “Cartes-de-Visite, Cabinet Cards, Tintype, etc.” However, the descriptions of the images do not include format or anything they know about the photographic method that was used. I can see that most of them are cartes-de-visite, but any user of the site who doesn’t know what those are is going to have to look elsewhere for a definition. The date of creation of most of these photos is unknown. A few of them have dates that place them as not yet in the public domain, going by the 120-year rule. Given that these are not 100% guaranteed copyright-free, it would be good to put some kind of rights statement/disclaimer on the site. I cannot find anything on the University of Missouri Digital Library site that talks about copyright at all.

The scanned images look good. The ones that are quite faded are difficult to see if a user is browsing through all of the images, but they show up well when they are enlarged. The dirt, scratches, cracks and blotches on the original photos are all here, but I don’t see any silver mirroring on these images. Is this something that would normally show up on a scan? The University of Missouri Digital Library program has posted Image Collection Guidelines that detail image file name and format standards and metadata standards. There’s also a link to the Virtually Missouri Digitization Guidelines that were used in this project. This is basically a digitization handbook, similar to the ones we have looked at in this class, which covers metadata, scanning and…copyright. At least someone is thinking about it.

Descriptive metadata provided for each photo includes a description of the picture, studio name and location, date (usually approximate), gender and whether it is a group photo. Administrative data includes the size of the original, a file name, and its location within the digital collection. The Visually Missouri Guidelines mandate use of the Dublin Core Elements and explain mandatory and optional elements. As I mentioned earlier, I feel strongly that it would be a good idea to indicate format and process here. I know this kind of thing costs money, but perhaps at some point the metadata could be tied to a search-and-retrieval system that could quickly show the user all of the photographs in sepia tone, for example. After all, the point of digitizing this stuff is so that people can use it.