The general goals of archival institutions include
collecting, preserving, and making available to the public, materials with
historical significance to the community the archive serves. When most people
think of archival collections, they probably think of letters, inventories,
bills, newspaper articles, etc. printed on yellowing paper. In other words,
they think of textual documents. Archives, however, collect much more than
documents. In addition to textual documents, an archive’s holdings frequently
include photographs, paintings, maps, as well as physical objects like medals,
buttons, pressed flower collections, and much, much, more. Archivists make
these items available to the public for view and use by creating descriptive
records of the collections. The records and frequently, images of the materials
are often posted online for the public to see. The process of creating
descriptive records is often a difficult one. Some materials, like photographs,
pose challenges for description.
One of
the biggest challenges archives face in creating descriptive records for
photographic materials manifests in the idea of aboutness. Photographic
materials have both an aboutness and an ofness. According to Christine Jacobs
in her article, “If a Picture is Worth a Thousand Words, Then”, ofness “relates
to the identifiable objects, people, or events in the image” and aboutness
“requires the analysis of what is happening in the image; it is an
interpretation of meaning.”[1]
Ofness is what is in the photograph. Aboutness is what the photograph means. Jacobs
provides an example of ofness versus aboutness. She presents an illustration of
a stork carrying a baby elephant in a cloth sack or pouch. The illustration is
of a stork, but the aboutness or meaning of the images is the idea of new birth
or the cultural myth of storks delivering babies to parents.[2]
Descriptive records of photographs should contain information about both the
ofness and aboutness of an image in order to be fully complete and successful. Without
one, the viewer is missing part of the story.
Aboutness
is challenging for two reasons: it is subjective and work intensive. The
subjective quality of aboutness can be seen in the article “What is a Picture
of?: Some Thoughts on Images and Archives” by Cara A. Finnegan.[3]
In the article, Finnegan describes her experience researching photographs in
the Farm Security Administrative-Office of War and Information file at the
Library of Congress. Finnegan explains that hard copies of prints in the
collection are housed in geographically arranged file cabinets[4]
and that she attempted to search through these cabinets to find this image,
titled “Shack in which rehabilitation client lives before obtaining resettlement
loan. Louisiana.”[5]
Source: http://www.loc.gov/item/fsa1998017600/PP/
Finnegan had previously seen the
image published in a 1936 magazine article about sharecropping. All she knew
about the image was the photographer, Arthur Rothstein. In order to locate the
print, she had to figure out the subject heading it was cataloged under. She
states that it took her several days of searching through the file cabinets to
locate the print because what she thought was a photo of “a farmer or
sharecropper beaten down by poverty yet confidently gazing toward the future”[6]
was filed under the category “shacks”. The title and category of this image and
Finnegan’s thoughts about it show just how subjective determining aboutness is.
The title creator and arranger felt the meaning of this image was the house or “shack”
in which the man lived, whereas Finnegan felt the meaning was the man, and the
struggles he lived through. This subjectiveness causes difficulty for catalogers
trying to make the image accessible because it is impossible to determine what every
potential user or researcher will conceive the aboutness of an image to be.
The second major problem with describing
aboutness is the amount of work it requires. Ascertaining an image’s aboutness
often requires background knowledge into the event, object, or person depicted
as well knowledge about the time period and the photographer. This poses two
problems. Doing that research and subject-analysis for every image in a
collection is very time consuming. Devoting so much time to it can cause a
back-log of material waiting to be processed to form or get worse. Archives are
also frequently under pressure from the community and/or donors to get
materials processed and make them available in a timely manner. Funding is also
a problem. Institutions may not have the funds to employ individuals to do this
subject-analysis and grants often stipulate a time frame for project
completion. For these reasons, this in-depth subject analysis may be impossible
for many institutions, especially when it comes to larger collections.
There a few practices archives can
employ as compromises to balance the need to determine aboutness and the infeasibility
of it. The first practice is to employ the idea of More Product Less Process
(MPLP). This is the idea of processing all collections and materials only
minimally, and then later going back and adding detail to those materials that
require it based on researcher use, interest, or institutional requirements. This
allows institutions to spend the money to complete the in-depth research for
aboutness only for the materials that need it the most. They can add it to any
materials that require it later on, rather than attempting it all at once.
One example of using MPLP for
subject-analysis of photographic materials can be found in Anne L. Foster’s
article, “Minimum Standards Processing and Photographic Collections”.[7]
Foster describes that the University of Alaska Fairbanks Archives had large photographic
collections as well as large processing backlogs. They had tried to describe
every image at the item-level but never had enough funds or time to complete
the collections, which caused the backlog.[8]
One collection Foster discusses is the William O. Field Papers which contained 4,000
photographic materials. Because this collection was created by a glaciologist,
and would have primarily scientific researchers, Foster decided the images did
not have to be item-level described. A scientist would want to view the entire
body of materials, not one single image. Collection and folder level description
was completed and a finding aid was written in a timely manner. Foster states
that the collection is used frequently with no complaints from researchers.[9]
Mary W. Elings presents a second
example of employing MPLP to solve the infeasibility of aboutness in “Pictoral
Archives and EAD: Indexing Collections for Online Access”.[10]
Elings discusses two collections at the Bancroft Library at the University of
California at Berkley. The San Francisco
News-Call Bulletin Newspaper Photograph Archive consists of over 300,000
negatives from 1915-1965 on a variety of subjects. This collection was too large
to catalog at the item-level because the library had limited time and funds to complete
the project. Elings explains that summaries were written for sections of
materials based on original order. Within these summaries, images considered “general
interest” were listed and images considered “high interest” were given more detailed
descriptions. A list of controlled subject terms was created and applied to the
summary entries based high interest materials in each section. Elings states
that the project was successfully completed within the 2-year time frame and
the finding aid allows users to search by subject to access relevant sections of
the collection.[11]
The second collection Elings
analyzes is the Robert B. Honeyman, Jr. Collection which contains 2,300 works
including paintings, prints, and drawings. Each item record was given at least
2-4 subject headings. The Bancroft Library felt that this collection required
this more detailed level of subject analysis because of the original paintings,
drawings, and works of historical significance it contained. The size of the collection
at 2,300 items was much more manageable than the 300,000 images in the San Francisco Bulletin collection.
Elings mentions that the Honeyman Collection was also successfully processed
and it’s finding aid is the most highly used.[12]
A second approach to solving the
difficulty of aboutness is to ask users for help. It is possible that users and
researchers will have more information about the events or people depicted in
the collection than the cataloger. Information provided by users can save the archive
time and money. In “Minimum Standards Processing and Photographic Collections”
Anne Foster mentions that when the University of Alaska Fairbanks Archives
adopted MPLP they began asking potential donors to identify images and provide
any other information about the materials to be donated that they could.[13]
One institution that welcomes and solicits
help with aboutness from users is the John F. Kennedy Presidential Museum and
Library. Earlier this year, I completed a digitization internship at the JFK
Library. It was my job to scan and catalog negatives in the White House
Photographs Collections. There were often images for which we had no
information and we could not spend prolonged periods of time researching them.
These images would be uploaded to the library’s website with as much
information as we had. On several occasions, we received messages from individuals
who worked for the Kennedy administration, such as secret services officials,
or people who had attended events at the White House and could tell us more
about it. When these individuals reached out to us, we would try to establish
good reports with them so we could potentially contact them with questions about
images in the future.
Similar
to the JFK Library, Barbara Orbach Natanson explains in her article, “Worth a
Billion Words? Library of Congress Pictures Online”, how users helped the
Library of Congress determine the aboutness of the photos in the George
Grantham Bain Collection.[14]
The Library of Congress acquired the Bain collection in 1948 and it represents
one of the first instances of photojournalism. When the library began
digitizing its materials, the priority was to make the Bain negatives available
as fast as possible. To meet this end, the original captions accompanying the
negatives were recorded. The images were then checked for quality and uploaded
to the website with no further research or fact-checking. Natanson states that
since they were digitized, the library has received correspondence from
numerous individuals offering further information about the aboutness of Bain’s
photographs. Two examples Natanson gives are: woman’s suffrage historians who recognized
well-known participants in the suffrage campaign in Bain’s photos and baseball
historians supplying identification and index terms for baseball images in the
collection.[15]
Descriptive
records of photographic materials no matter whether they are described at the
item, folder, group, or collection level, need to include both the ofness and
aboutness of the materials. Both elements are crucial to understanding the
images, and without one or the other, viewers are missing a part of the story.
This may seem like a daunting task but it is possible for an institution to complete
it successfully within its means if it utilizes help from the outside and the
idea of More Product Less Process.
[1]
Christine Jacobs, “If a Picture is Worth a Thousand Words, Then..,” The Indexer 21, no. 3 (1999): 119-21,
Accessed December 4, 2015., 120.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Cara
Finnegan, “What is This a Picture Of?: Some Thoughts on Images and Archives,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs, (2006).
[4] Ibid.,
117.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Anne
Foster, “Minimum Standards Processing and Photograph Collection,” Arch Issues, 30, no. 2 (2006): 107-118.
[8] Ibid.,
109.
[9]
Ibid., 110-111.
[10] Mary
Elings, “Pictoral Archives and EAD: Indexing Collections for Online Access,” Art Documentation, 19, no. 2 (2000):
10-14.
[11] Ibid.,
11-13.
[12]
Ibid., 12-13.
[13] Foster,
“Minimum Standards Processing and Photograph Collection”, 112.
[14] Barbara
Orbach Natanson, “Worth a Billion Words? Library of Congress Pictures Online,” Jornal of American History, (2007): 99-111.
[15]
Ibid., 102-104.
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