The problem with visual materials: Implications for archival access

Archivists have long acknowledged that visual materials such as photographs can provide rich, valuable, and unique cultural information. Yet collecting institutions have been notably slow to adapt and model descriptive standards specific to visual materials. Moreover, the archival literature has paid limited attention to the problem of visual material description and access. The few exceptions suggest that archivists should aim to develop visual literacy skills to improve description efforts. Though writing primarily about photograph appraisal, William Leary advises that archivists processing visual materials should be both “students of history” and “student[s] of the history of photography.”100 _{Elisabeth Kaplan and Jeffrey Mifflin advocate for}

archivists to familiarize themselves with visual communication methods and borrow aesthetic approaches from photography, film, and video to formalize literacies.101 _{In Photographs:}

99 _{The MODS User Guidelines provides examples for different material types, such as this entry for a digitized}

photograph which was an original 35MM slide digitized as a TIFF in 2003:

http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/mods-userguide-examples.html#digitized_photograph.

100 _{William H. Leary, The Archival Appraisal of Photographs: A RAMP Study with Guidelines (Paris: United}

Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, 1985): Section 2.5.2.

101 _{Elisabeth Kaplan and Jeffrey Mifflin, “‘Mind and Sight’: Visual Literacy and the Archivist,” Archival Issues 21,}

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Archival Care and Management, Helen Zinkham’s chapter entitled “Reading and Research Photographs” provides an in-depth explanation of how archivists might describe photographic materials. She instructs archivists to study both photographs and negatives carefully, noting any written information on the materials themselves or on their containers. She describes potential reference sources such as pictorial histories, histories of photography, and photography dictionaries, directories, and databases that might help identify relevant details.102

There are inherent complexities in describing and providing access to visual materials for archives. Joan Schwartz argues that by “embracing a textual model of recorded information and by adopting a bibliographic model of image classification, archives continue to fixate on the factual content rather than the functional origins of visual images.”103 _{For Schwartz, the}

continued use of descriptive standards and models developed for text-based materials ultimately complicates access to photographic materials. Jane Greenberg agrees that current descriptive standards place constraints on access to visual materials, particularly across domains.104 _She

analyzes metadata element usage from four common metadata schemas: (VRA Core, EAD, the Dublin Core, and Record Export for Art and Cultural Heritage (REACH)) and identifies four types of functional metadata classes: discovery, use, authentication, and administration. Rather than rely on domain-specific metadata schemas, Greenberg argues that one can better exploit access to images through the development of metadata schemas based on function rather than domain. She asks: “Why not permit the photographic archival image documenting the

102 _{Helena Zinkham, “Reading and Researching Photographs,” in Photographs: Archival Care and Management, ed.}

Mary Lynn Ritzenthaler and Diane Vogt-O’Connor (Chicago: The Society of American Archivists, 2006), 59-77.

103 _{Joan M. Schwartz, “Coming to Terms with Photographs: Descriptive Standards, Linguistic ‘Othering,’ and the}

Margins of Archivy,” Archivaria 54 (2002): 143.

104 _{Jane Greenberg, “A Quantitative Categorical Analysis of Metadata Elements in Image-Applicable Metadata}

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construction of the Brooklyn Bridge to be accessible as an art image with aesthetic qualities and as a visual resource portraying state-of-the-art bridge engineering using wire cables during the latter half of the 19th _century?”105 _{In other words, metadata schema design should support}

functions across domains (such as discovery of images, regardless of disciplinary background) rather than focusing on designs to meet the needs of only one domain.

Given the relationship between archival description and access, the archival profession could benefit from a better understanding of the nature, purpose, and use of photographic materials in archives. What do users need from image collections in order to make sense and establish meaning? How do they experience visual information in the digital realm? Paul

Conway and Ricardo Punzalan sum up the challenges: “Archivists, grappling with photography’s idiosyncrasies as a medium, find it difficult to articulate photographic meaning, and have been uncomfortable about its place in the archives in relation to other holdings. This uneasiness has profoundly constrained our ability to handle photographs, in both practice and theory.”106

As documents living in an archive, photographs are inextricably tied to their

contemporaneous structures and cultural norms of the day. Such is the curse of visual materials which must be interpreted at some level to be described; how one interprets a photograph forty years from now may in fact differ quite dramatically from the ways in which it is interpreted and described today. In his important exposition, Tim Schlack uses archival literature from the 1970s forward to show changing conceptions of the archival photograph, moving from image as

105 _{Ibid, 921.}

106_{Paul Conway and Ricardo Punzalan, “Fields of Vision: Toward a New Theory of Visual Literacy for Digitized} Archival Photographs,” Archivaria 71 (2011): 68.

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evidential historical fact to the more recent status of image as representation.107 _{The archivists’}

burden is that in each of these contested spaces, a photograph’s description must endure. As Schlack writes, “Working with photographs then is a process of substantiating the most valid narrative that a photograph collection can evoke and transcribing it into the academic discourse of our time.”108 _{For archivists, the great obstacle remains how to effectively situate the}

photograph, whose meaning and interpretation is only ever temporally fixed, in archival spaces that exist in perpetuity.

2.3 LIS Approaches to Studying Image Use

There is a noticeable absence in the LIS literature of qualitative examinations of

information use in image collections. The empirical work on image collection use tends to focus on the following themes: identifying information needs to improve image retrieval, analysis of user queries submitted to retrieval systems, and examination of transaction logs or citations to quantify usage statistics. Few studies examine aspects of the user experience interacting with images. What are the qualitatively different ways in which users interact with visual information in the digital realm? In this section, I will briefly review the LIS literature on use of image collections. How has use in image collections been studied? First, I will review studies which use query analysis as the basis for understanding information needs in image retrieval systems. Next I will explore task-based approaches to image collection use. Finally, I will review the literature that examines experiential aspects of use in image collections.

107 _{Tim Schlack, “Framing Photographs, Denying Archives: The Difficulty of Focusing on Archival Photographs,”}

Archival Science 8, no. 2 (2008): 85–101.

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