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Pitching pictures: the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog at the Library of Congress1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 June 2016

Helena Zinkham*
Affiliation:
Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC20540-4730, USA
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Abstract

This article is a sales pitch for pictures, even though art librarians already value visual materials highly. A decade’s advances in online access at a major documentary picture provider, the Library of Congress’ Prints and Photographs Division, should encourage librarians to visit the online United States national library often, and also to offer more of their own collections through the World Wide Web. Despite the beneficial digital image navigation features introduced into the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC), many improvements are still needed and there is a long list of desirable future developments. Reference librarians, catalogers, curators, digital conversion specialists and web designers are all invited to contribute to online reference aids as well as online catalogs, to help people succeed more often in finding pictures.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Art Libraries Society 2002

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References

1. This is an edited version of a paper first given on 17 August 2001 at the satellite meeting held in conjunction with the IFLA 2001 conference in Boston, sponsored by the New England Chapter of ARLIS/NA, IFLA’s Section of Art Libraries and ARLIS/NA.Google Scholar
2. Arms, Caroline R.Getting the picture: observations from the Library of Congress on providing online access to pictorial images’. Library trends vol. 48 no. 2 Fall 1999, p.379409. Available online at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/techdocs/libtl999/libtl999.html Google Scholar
3. A sampler of web catalogs for pictorial collections is available through the Library of Congress (http://lcweb.loc.gov/print/rr/vmbib.html)Google Scholar