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Article
Overcoming legacy processing in photographic collections through collaboration and digital technologies.
Collections: a journal for museum and archives professionals (2018)
  • Terri Holtze, University of Louisville
  • Rachel I. Howard, University of Louisville
  • Randy Kuehn, University of Louisville
  • Rebecca Pattillo, University of Louisville
  • Elizabeth Reilly, University of Louisville
Abstract
In the 1960s, a Louisville photography studio began donating its negatives, prints, and invoices to the University of Louisville Photographic Archives. The Caufield & Shook Collection remains a significant primary source for local history and a prime candidate for digitization. Unfortunately, on its receipt non-archivists processed the collection with little documentation of original order or organizational decision making. Additionally, workflow choices were determined largely by the desire to maximize student labor. In 2017, the Digital Initiatives Librarian worked with in-house application developers and archives staff to create a workflow that has significantly sped up the process of making this valuable photographic collection accessible online. This article describes how archivists recovered from the poor processing decisions, used technology to enhance the digitization workflow, and developed a list of best practices for future processing and digitization of large photographic collections.
Keywords
  • Processing,
  • Digitization,
  • Metadata,
  • Photographs,
  • Archives
Publication Date
Spring 2018
Citation Information
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Rowman & Littlefield in Collections: a journal for museum and archives professionals.