The Online Archive of California has several photographic collections that deal with the aftermath of the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906. Instead of looking at just one of these finding aids, I decided to look at four of them to see if the vocabulary was consistent, or if there were issues in description from collection to collection. I wanted to do this because it seems to me that if someone is looking for images or information on the 1906 Earthquake, they are not going to stop at one collection, they are going to be looking for as many images and as much information about it as possible. Three of the collections listed on the Online Archive of California are from the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, and one of the collections is from the Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library at UCLA. The different repositories may use different cataloging systems, and I was interested in seeing if the Online Archive of California did anything to create a way to reconcile two different systems.
I did not conduct a search to find the collections. Because I was unfamiliar with the types of collections on the Online Archive of California, I opted to “Browse Collections” to get a feel for what they had. The “Browse” screen gives you the option to hide the collection description, which gives you a list of collections like this:
Alternately, you can opt to “Show collection descriptions”, which gives you much more information about each collection. If you aren’t familiar with the collections, it is much nicer to be able to see collection descriptions, rather than just a list of titles, which can be quite overwhelming.
They also have a system to show which collections have online items available. The little red eye next to some of the collections makes it easy to tell that there are items that you can look at online.
Only one of the collections that I looked at had digitized images available alongside the finding aid, which I feel is detrimental to the other image collections. That collection, “1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire Digital Collection” from UC Berkeley, is also the only collection of the four to include pages of text and not just images. While it is important to catalog photographic collections, the finding aids are lacking an important component in this digital environment. If a researcher is looking for information on a photographic collection online, they will most likely expect to see at least a few of the images digitized and included with the finding aid. The fact that the collection with the images available online comes from UC Berkeley indicates to me that the repository does not have a standard practice when it comes to digitizing collections or not.
“1906 earthquake damage in San Jose and San Francisco [graphic]”, and “1906 earthquake, Western scenery, and other views [graphic]”
These two records provide a “Brief Record Only”, which does not include a full finding aid, only a basic record of the collection. These records contain information such as title, creator, subject headings, and notes, but do not contain any addition descriptions of the specific images in the collection.
These records contain subject headings, which appear to be fairly consistent between the two records. These subject headings also consistently appeared in the other two collections that I looked at. They include:
- Earthquakes -- California -- San Francisco -- Photographs
- Fires -- California -- San Francisco -- Photographs
- Earthquakes -- California -- San Jose -- Photographs
- San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, Calif., 1906 -- Photographs
and
- Earthquakes -- California -- San Francisco -- Photographs
- Disaster relief -- California -- San Francisco -- Photographs
- Soldiers -- California -- Photographs
- San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, Calif., 1906 -- Photographs
- Yosemite National Park (Calif.) -- Pictorial works
- San Francisco (Calif.) -- Pictorial works
- West (U.S.) -- Pictorial works
- Oregon -- Pictorial works
- Washington (State) -- Pictorial works
While most of these are locational, and I could think of several other subjects that could be useful for accessing the collections, it’s good to see the specification of "Photographs” and “Pictorial Works” used, as well as the fact that they included more than three headings.
Both of these finding aids specify the “type” as being “graphic”, which is not a very good description of the collections. One of them is a photo album of prints, while the other is a collection of prints, formats which are addressed in the physical description, but not in the type sections of the finding aid. In addition, one of the collections has the type of photographic process documented (albumen), while the other gives no indication of the type of photographic process. This is disappointing, seeing as both collections are held at UC Berkeley, I would have liked more consistency across records.
I also think that it is interesting to note that in the titles of the collection on the Online Archive of California, the first collection has a period after the title, while none of the other collections I looked at seem to. This may be nitpicky, but considering that the collections are coming from the same institution, and are being presented through the same database, this seems like the type of thing that should be consistent throughout the collection records.
“Guide to the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire Digital Collection”, and “Photograph album of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, 1906”
These two collections have full finding aids available online. “Guide to the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire Digital Collection” includes digitized images of the collection, and has the finding aid accessible through the Online Archive of California, but does not include a PDF copy of it. The “Photograph album of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, 1906” has a PDF copy of the finding aid available, and is also accessible through the Online Archive of California. “Photograph album of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, 1906” is the collection housed at UCLA rather than UC Berkeley, so I was expecting to see some differences between this collection’s documentation and the other three.
The finding aid record for the“Photograph album of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, 1906” collection does not provide much more information than the brief records discussed above. The collection does not have any digitized images available to accompany it, and it gives only the most basic information necessary to fill out the finding aid. The “Genres and Forms of Materials” are documented as being photographic prints, and photograph albums, which is not very informative about the photographic processes used to create these photos. I was happy to see that the fact that this collection was in an album was noted, but I feel that more information could have been included to further describe the album and the types of photos included. Because this is a full finding aid, there is a Scope and Content note which the first two records I looked at were lacking. The physical description section provides more information about the album that the images are in, but is not clearly visible from the main record page.
The finding aid for this collection does not go into item-level description about the images within the album, and instead describes just the album itself.
The “Guide to the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire Digital Collection” is the only record that I looked at that contained digital images to accompany the finding aid. The finding aid contained the same basic information as the other ones, including subject headings, title, creators, and a brief description of the collection. This collection, however, is considerably larger than the other ones, and contains more than just photographs, which may account for the more in-depth description that is provided online. This finding aid goes to an item-level description, including digitized copies of the photographs in the collection, and, when you click on the title of the image, brief records for each of the items. 
These records are in no way extensive, but they do provide more information about the images than can be found in the other collections. As you can see from the screenshot above, the subject terms are still very much lacking. The image being shown is of Telegraph Hill in San Francisco on fire as a result of the 1906 earthquake, but nowhere in the subjects is it mentioned that there is a fire, or what area of San Francisco it may be. The title section, while extensive, contains almost too much information. Information about the photographer and the publication of the photo could have been included under a different heading. This type of title appears on several, though not all of the images.
Conclusions
Overall the finding aids tended to use the term “Pictorial Works” rather than something like “images” or “graphics”. While I do think this is a better label for the photographic collections, I’m not entirely satisfied with any of the terminology used to describe photographic collections. I thought that the records were inconsistent in the type of information being provided about the collections. Only two of the records that I looked at specified the photographic process used, and the two collections that were contained within albums did not make that fact readily obvious.
While I understand that the Online Archive of California is merely a database used to house information about collections from a variety of sources around the state of California, I would have liked there to be more consistency in the cataloging of the collections.
Finding aids work well to bring attention to archival collections, and to describe those collections to potential users, but I think that when used to describe photographic collections they are lacking. The best of the finding aids that I looked at was definitely the one that included digitized images of the collection, but I know that time and budgets prevent that from being possible for every photographic collection. I think that the field would greatly benefit from a better controlled vocabulary for photographic collections, as well as a better understanding of how to describe them for users. These types of collections do not benefit from a MPLP approach, as the greater level of description makes it easier for the researcher to understand the types of images available within it.
Sources
- 1906 earthquake damage in San Jose and San Francisco [graphic]. 1906. UC Berkeley Bancroft Library, accessed March 17, 2014, http://www.oac.cdlib.org/search?style=oac4;titlesAZ=0;idT=UCb107717906
- 1906 earthquake, Western scenery, and Other views [graphic]. 1906. UC Berkeley Bancroft Library, accessed March 17, 2014, http://www.oac.cdlib.org/search?style=oac4;titlesAZ=0;idT=UCb107310338
- Guide to the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire Digital Collection. 1906. UC Berkeley Bancroft Library, accessed March 17, 2014, http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/hb8779p2cx/
- Photograph Album of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire. 1906. UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, accessed March 17, 2014, http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8s46t5g/
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