Decide What You Want: When looking for photographs, decide what you are trying to find before you begin your search. While it is not always possible to find exactly what you imagined, general descriptions can help the archivist guide you to the best possible collections that would fit your research. For example you can narrow your search if you decide some simple overarching categories like the ones below.
Buildings:
Inside or outside; Time of year (season)
People or No People
Views: aerial, ground level, panorama, details
People:
Formal Portrait; Informal Portrait; Group Portrait; Action
Age of subject: baby, adult, senior
Places:
Landscapes; Subject(s); Time of year (season)
Events:
Dates & What are you trying to capture, the people, atmosphere, or something else?
If you are looking for CU photographs, here are a few collections that have a large number of photographs.
| University of Colorado Boulder Publicity Offices collection | Since 1921, campus publicity services at the University of Colorado Boulder-including publications, photography, news, and media-were offered under a variety of department and office titles. |
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University of Colorado Boulder Museum of Natural History collection |
The University of Colorado, Museum of Natural History was declared as its own department in 1909. Within this collection there are historical photographs of campus, Boulder and the surrounding areas as well as nature and science photography. |
| The University of Colorado Boulder Photograph Collection is an aggregation of photographs donated to the Archives over the years pertaining to the campus. | |
| Charles Snow operated as a profession Boulder photographer between 1910 and 1964. He considered himself the unofficial campus photographer and sold the portion of his collection dealing with the University of Colorado in 1964 to the University. | |
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The materials in the A.A. and Laurence Paddock collection consists of photographs and printed materials and were compiled by the Boulder Daily Camera from its early days in the 1890’s to 1990. These photos were published in the newspaper concerning events at the University of Colorado. |
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The Ira Current collection includes information about his family and non-family members. The bulk of his collection contains close to 20,000 photographs and 435 moving image films. The photographic materials include negatives, slides and photographic prints taken of his life at the University of Colorado Boulder, and family, friends and subject interests after college. |
Searching by Format: Currently ASpace does not allow for searching collections by format. While you can put format terms in the search field and find results, it will not pull up everything. Over the years a variety of terms were used in describing photographs finding aids. These include the words like, image; images; photo; photos; photograph; or photographs. There may also be other specific formats listed, such as “negatives” or “cyanotypes.” Try searching all these terms within a collection if what you initially tried is not producing results.
Image Descriptions Challenges:
Limited Information in Finding Aid- Often with older finding aids you will have a detailed listing of everything in the collection followed by a box or folder that simply says “photographs.” Until recently, archives have historically grouped photographs in a finding aid into the “and photographs” category. This older concept that a photograph is not as powerful of a historical record compared to the written word is incorrect. This practice has generated a large backlog of uncatalogued photographs within collections. Do not be discouraged! There are ways to tackle this. You can either:
Describing What's in Photographs- It is challenging when it comes to describing what is in a photograph. The phrase "A picture is worth a thousand words" comes to mind when viewing a photograph. One researcher might be looking for the people within a photograph, while others are interested in the background or foreground of the image and not the people. It is difficult to convey in a written description everything that is of interest in a photograph. With this in mind look outside normal key words when searching for photographs.
Context Clues- Another big challenge is that a large number of the photographs within our collections have no information at all. The archivist
must extrapolate from the context clues as to what the image is of, who is in the image, the year, time of year, etc. When you are reviewing photographs in a collection you can also do this for any unidentified photographs by noting the types of cars (license plate dates) in a photograph, hair styles, existing buildings, etc. The descriptions staff assign to images are given as factually as possible, but remember what you want identified may not always be in the description. Take a moment to factor in what other people might assign as descriptive terminology, or look for context clues in the finding aid that might lead you to the image you need.
Older terminology- Over time archivist have worked diligently towards providing accurate terminology for materials in a collection. However, acceptable terms have shifted over the years. Older terms can be harmful, misleading, or just wrong. While we strive to eliminate all unacceptable terminology this will take a long time as we have millions of documents, photographs and other materials to review and update. For this reason, while not ideal, it could be useful to search some of these terms until we can update all descriptions. Some of these terms may also be retained, in some form with warnings, in an effort to not cover up the challenges of our past and move toward a better future.