Bostonian Society and JFK Presidential Library

The Bostonian Society (http://rfi.bostonhistory.org/)

The Bostonian Society's photograph collection is primarily made up of photographs of various buildings and structures that stood or once stood in Boston.  Photographs like these hold great value for architects and according to the Society's archivist, Elizabeth Roscio, the photograph collections are a big draw for researchers to the archive.

The website is not very impressive, but it is functional.  You'll be greeted by a search box where you can do a simple keyword search, but to really explore the collections I recommend you use the advanced search feature.  Here you'll have the option to search at the collection, series, and item level.  You can also browse the collections by topic, form or genre, geographic terms, and corporate and personal names.

The collection level descriptions are very broad and in many cases lengthy.  The person who wrote these descriptions has done a fine job of laying out the scope of the collections so the user would be able to decide if the items would be relevant to their research.  Unfortunately there is not a direct link from the collection level descriptions to the digitized photographs themselves, making the website difficult to navigate in my cases.

Old State House, ca. 1870

At the item level the descriptions are written in great detail.  The cataloger describes signage, locations of people in the image, and the location of the building it self, in some cases down to the street number.  Every photograph has multiple subject and geographical headings.  You can tell that the catalogers took great pains to describe these photographs, maybe more than was necessary.

JFK Presidential Library & Museum (http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Search-the-Digital-Archives.aspx)

The JFK Library has a rich collection of photographs documenting the presidency of John F. Kennedy.  The archives has a strong digitization program and is constantly working to digitize much of its 400,000 photographs.

JFK watches his children, Caroline and John Jr., play in the Oval Office

The descriptions are very detailed at both the collection and item level.  JFK benefits from knowing the context of almost every photograph in its collection.  They have the advantage of having access to photographer's logs and appointment books which they mine to put the photos in the proper context.  Also, they know the creators of many of the photos.  For example, the White House Photograph Collection (WHP) is largely made up of photos by photographers hired by the White House to document the day to day events of the President.  In the WHP the three series of the collection are separated by photographer.

Unlike the Bostonian Society, JFK leaves most of the description to the photograph and chooses instead to give a short summary of the event that is taking place.  They take full advantage of the other fields in their metadata to give more information about the photograph.  Especially handy is the "Person(s)" field which links to all the other digitized photos in the archive.

Of course the resources of the JFK Library pale in comparison to that of the Bostonian Society, but both have done excellent jobs of explaining what their collections contain and making them widely available for view.