American Antiquarian Society and the Peabody Essex Museum

For this assignment I chose to look at the online collections of the American Antiquarian Society and the Peabody Essex Museum.

                The American Antiquarian Society (AAS) has a very extensive collection of images digitized and available online.  They have GIGI, the AAS Digital Imaging Archive, as well as an "Illustrated Inventory." The Illustrated Inventory gives a sampling of digitized content, browsable by format (ambrotype, tintype, etc)and a limited number of subjects (Paul Revere Collection, Photographs of Native Americans), but not by keyword search. Once the user clicks on a subject or format link, a list of digitized items is shown alphabetically by creator. All items have a title and creator, and many have descriptions and historical notes. Many cased photographs also include close-up images of the case itself, which can be extremely useful in providing context to the photograph. Each subset that contains standard glass plate sizes also shows a key to the dimensions of each size plate, from Imperial to down to Gem-sized. This use of standardized terms rather than dimensions can make the cataloger's job much easier.

                The AAS also provides an extremely useful resource in its' Collection Access chart.

                This chart lists the Society's holdings in general groups, and provides notes on how much, if any, of the catalog entries are available online. This way, if a researcher is looking for almanacs between 1821 and 1876 and is not having much success at locating anything on the website, he still knows that some records are not fully cataloged online and can consult with an archivist to see what is available on-site.

                While the AAS's Illustrated Inventory has beautifully cataloged entries, it holds just a small fraction of the photography collection. The main bulk of the cataloged and digitized items are found in GIGI, the Digital Imaging Archive. There are 62,875 items in GIGI, but the cataloging here is basic at best. This is what many of the images look like:

 

There is no information attached to these images that can be of any use to a researcher. They have no title, no creator and not even a general tag such as "photograph," never mind a more specific citation of the process used to take the image. Many images simply have identification numbers. The GIGI database can be searched by browsing through supplied categories from a menu on the left-hand side of the page, or can be keyword searched in the advanced search menu. The supplied categories are useful because they give the user an idea of the scope of the Society's collections, and also seems to lead users to the more popular images, as many of the objects within the categories have more useful catalog entries.

                The Peabody Essex Museum has a very different online collection. Their site is much newer and more interactive and intuitive for the user. However, they do not have a large amount of their photography collection digitized. At first glance, it seemed to be that the photographs in the collage on their Photography page were the only items available digitally.

                                                   

Each image is clickable and leads to a larger image and the catalog entry; these entries contain the title, dates, creator, dimensions, process and donor of the object, as well as an accession number. The interface is sleek and easy to use. After poking around the site, I found a link to their online collection, housed in a database called ARTscape. This database allows users to search the digitized collection as a whole or to narrow it to a group, like Korean Art or Photography. The digitized Photography collection is made up of only 199 photographs, although the PEM claims to have almost 1 million photographs in its collection. When I searched for Photography in the online collection, the results appeared 9 at a time in a rather small banner along the bottom of the page.  Mousing over the images gives the title and date, and clicking on the image brings up a larger view of the image and record information.

The record above contains a very limited amount of cataloging information. There is an option to "View Record," which I hoped would give more information, or at least include the photographic process, but the record contained the exact same information that is listed next to the image.  I did find several images with more extensive information given, but they make up a very small percentage of the 199 images that PEM has chosen to digitize.

                While the American Antiquarian Society has many of its objects available in digital format, and the Peabody Essex Museum has a beautiful and interactive interface, both collections could benefit from better cataloging practices. It doesn't matter how many images are digitize or how nice a database looks, if a researcher can't search the collection it is not being used to its full potential.