For this week’s assignment I chose to look at a photographic collection from the Online Archive of California: Photograph Album of the Cruise of the Revenue Cutter "Corwin" in Alaska, 1883. This particular collection consists of a photograph album of 36 photographs depicting the sights and peoples experienced by the voyagers of the “Corwin”- an Alaskan Cruise ship. The photographs in the album depict Alaskan nature scenes and harbors; Inuit people, dwellings and villages; and documentation of the fur trade in the 19th century.
Initially when I went to the Online Archive of California website I went to the Browse Collection Tab to search for a photographic collection. The finding aids are listed alphabetically and there is an eye icon that signifies to the user which collections are available to view online. The first few photograph collections I chose, to get a feel for the archive’s holdings, had very detailed finding aids and all of the photos had been digitized. However these photographs had very skeletal descriptions that did not provide much more information to the user other than the title, which has been supplied by the cataloger in most cases, and the item’s call number, plus a copy right note from the contributing institution. After searching around I was able to find the OAC’s section of just Photographic Archives by looking through the Contributing Institutions tab and finding the Huntington Library which has a Photo Archives. This institution provided collections that had a far better level of detailed description.
The collection guide for the Photograph Album of the Cruise of the Revenue Cutter "Corwin" in Alaska, 1883 is fairly succinct. It provides a detailed but short description of the album and useful background information to the people who are related to the collection, which all serves to provide contextual information to a user who may not be familiar with the history of Alaskan natives. The finding aid pdf is available to view through a link on the right hand corner of the collection overview page. The finding aid again provides added contextual information about the cruise voyage and more specifically about the content of the collection (in the Scope & Content Note). There are a lot of different places that information can be found in the Collection Overview page as well as in the Finding Aid, so it can get confusing as information is repeated in different places in the collection description and in the notes in the finding aid. 
The entirety of the Photograph Album of the Cruise of the Revenue Cutter "Corwin" in Alaska, 1883 has been digitized and is available for users to view from the Huntington Digital Library website. The finding aid itself has a list of indexing terms that have been used to describe the collection as a whole. And then the digital object itself has a detailed object description of the photo album as a whole as well as an individual description for each image captured from the photo album. The Huntington Digital Library uses CONTENTdm software and the Dublin Core Metadata Schema for their data entry and digital projects (Huntington Digital Library, 2012).
At a first glance through the digitized collection the whole album description appears to be highly detailed overall. And the individual item descriptions are also highly detailed. One thing that I noticed is that the cataloger provided a date range within two years (1881-1883) for each photograph, but this also seems odd that the cataloger(s) were not able to pinpoint a more specific date- down to the year, for example, but that is obviously a limitation of information that has been provided in the manuscript. Another useful thing in the description of the individual images is that the cataloger listed the title from the manuscript page that was created contemporaneously to the photographs. In addition to that the individual photo description the title comes from what is written in the photo album under each image. I noticed that a creator name is not listed, which is probably just indicative of the fact that there may have been no names associated with the album, and because the Huntington Library purchased the album from a bookstore as opposed to receiving it as a donation/gift from a family.
Another drawback to the description of the individual images is that the only time subject index terms are listed is in the whole object description, which leaves out the terms that could potentially be identified in the individual photographic images. I also noticed that there is a catalog supplied title in addition to the ‘Alt Title’ that was taken from the manuscript page. I’m not sure if this is necessary because I think that the contemporary title is the one that would provide more context and information to the user as it is from the time of the album’s creation. And a last drawback to the description of the photographs is that the Huntington Library uses the Dublin Core Metadata Schema for their descriptive elements of the photographic collection. And the weakness in using Dublin Core is that since it is supposed to provide a standardized method for data exchange it can be limiting because of the schema’s simplicity and that it does not enforce any kind of consistency- Dublin Core just does not rise to the task of specialized metadata because of its simplicity (Benson, 2010).
Overall I think that the description for this collection provides a great amount of detail and useful contextual information to the user. Aside from some of the lacking elements of description the information provided nicely highlights the digitized photos. And the set up of the collection description/overview page and and the page of the digitized album are laid out pretty well.I find the whole site to be very functional and user friendly. The website is not as confusing to navigate as other digital archives can be.
Sources:
- Photograph Album of the Cruise of the Revenue Cutter "Corwin" in Alaska, 1883. Huntington Library. Photo Archives, accessed March 18, 2014, http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8dj5dmp/entire_text/.
- Photograph Album of the Cruise of the Revenue Cutter "Corwin" in Alaska, accessed March 18, 2014, http://hdl.huntington.org/cdm/compoundobject/collection/p15150coll2/id/7861/rec/1.
- Huntington Digital Library Guidelines: Metadata creation and application, 2012, accessed March 18, 2014, http://hdl.huntington.org/cdm/ref/collection/p16003coll9/id/0.
- Benson, Allen. “The Archival Photograph and It’s Meaning: Formalisms for Modeling Images.” Journal of Archival Organization, February 1, 2010. Accessed March, 18, 2014. http://www.ontophoto.org/Articles/BensonJAO.pdf.
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