Industry: Museum Launches Free Online Image Database

Abstract

The American Museum of Natural History's (AMNH) research library on April 28 hosted the official launch of its new online image database for Digital Special Collections. Begun as a project to digitize 1,000 of the museum's photos and rare book illustrations using grant funding from the New York Metropolitan Library Council, the Digital Special Collections program has evolved into a long-term project that will offer the public free online access to the museum's research library materials.

Industry: Museum Launches Free Online Image Database

Thousands of photos still a fraction of holdings

The American Museum of Natural History's (AMNH) research library on April 28 hosted the official launch of its new online image database for Digital Special Collections. Begun as a project to digitize 1,000 of the museum's photos and rare book illustrations using grant funding from the New York Metropolitan Library Council, the Digital Special Collections program has evolved into a long-term project that will offer the public free online access to the museum's research library materials. The new database includes more than 7,000 archival images that document the museum's efforts in New York and globally.

These images are just a fraction of the museum's holdings, said Tom Baione, AMNH's Harold Boeschenstein director of library services, during his introduction to the museum's "Slide Slam: From Archive to Art" event, held at AMNH's Kaufmann Theater to debut the new database.

"The Digital Special Collections site, unfortunately, only makes available less than one percent of the images in the library's collections," he said. "Before the advent of the Internet and Powerpoint, educators and lecturers had to use slides, and the library sold copies of images from our collections.... Every year, we sold tens of thousands of these slides to fill those old-fashioned slide carousels."

This digitization effort has captured images from many of those lantern slides, "illustrating cultures, paleontology, botany, and zoology in places as diverse as Greenland, Mongolia, and Kenya," according to an AMNH description.

The image database also features illustrations from the research library's 14,000 rare books, "including the work of pioneers in natural science from as early as the 16th century"; the research library's Julian Dimock Collection of approximately 3,400 photographs on glass "documenting the daily lives of African Americans in South Carolina and Alabama, new immigrants at Ellis Island, and the Seminole Indians of Florida at the turn of the last century"; the Lumholtz Collection, with images documenting ethnographer Carl S. Lumholtz's four expeditions to northwestern Mexico between 1890 and 1898; the Jesup North Pacific Expedition collection documenting "the peoples and cultures of the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America and the eastern coast of Siberia from 1897 to 1902"; and photos capturing the museum's own educational programs and activities.

The Digital Special Collections project uses flatbed scanning, adhering to standards and workflows based on the Federal Agencies Digitization Guideline Initiative's (FADGI) Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Cultural Heritage Materials. Images are cataloged by staff, interns, and volunteers, with data entered into modified Dublin Core fields in an Omeka database.