“Bicycle Party at Triberg” from the book Eight Journeys Abroad (1917), p. 331, by Mary D. & Frank H. Richardson

It has been about a month since I’ve posted any Tips, but since then some wonderful, newsworthy items were announced. Those that I want to share with you, cited below, all pertain to finding photographs and images. No matter what your interest, these could be a welcome addition to your arsenal of image search sources.

On August 20th a post about a website, called “The Public Domain Review,” appeared on a blog called Free Technology for Teachers written by Richard Byrne.  The website Byrne discusses cites “images, books, essays, audio recordings, and films that are in the public domain.” http://tinyurl.com/ozampup 

Here is a direct link to the website   http://publicdomainreview.org/ You can browse by a particular medium (images, film, books, audio), a particular time (century), or a keyword (tag), and there are a multitude of tags. When I was visiting the site, I found that parts of it are “under construction,” but there is really quite a lot you can see and use right now (you can also see some of the PDR’s images on Pinterest).

Links given here connect you with various repositories, Flickr, etc. Visit this site whenever you are looking for illustrations for your blog, your family history, an article, a book, a presentation, or just about anything else you can think of.  And you can find wonderful, free-to-use animated GIFs here, too! Many of the images used as examples come from British collections, but do not let that stop you, you can find wonderful images here from all over the world.

I love the photo above that I found through the Public Domain Review website – it is one of several cabinet cards of baseball players posed in the photographer’s studio of  Gilbert & Bacon of Philadelphia. This photograph is from the over 500 photos, prints, drawings, caricatures, and printed illustrations in the New York Public Library’s Spalding Collection. That collection was given to the Library in 1921 by early baseball player and sporting-goods tycoon A. G. Spalding. The other baseball photos are at http://tinyurl.com/pd8w2zo

Essays of interest to photo-historians, art historians, and others are also found on the PDR site. Take a look at “The Serious and the Smirk: The Smile in Portraiture” at http://tinyurl.com/qyr66yl

Some exciting news about a newer post to Flickr surfaced late last month. The photographs and drawings that are in the over 600 million library book pages scanned and available at Internet Archive, are now accessible. This is thanks to Kalev Leetaru, a man who wrote his own code to work around the way the books were originally digitized (optical character recognition, or OCR). Thus we now have access to the Internet Archive Book Images. The image of the group on bicycles at the head of this post is one of those images found in a book.

His software is designed to also include the caption for every image, as well as text from the paragraphs found just before and just after it in the book. His code is being made available to other libraries and archives. Imagine the wonderful images that could now be made accessible!

Mr. Leetaru was researching communications technology at Georgetown University, part of a fellowship sponsored by Yahoo, owner of Flickr, when he became involved in doing this project. The images he has made available date from 1500 to 1922. He says “Take a random page about a historical event and there’s probably a good chance that you’re going to find an image in here that bears in some way on that event or location.”

Read about the project here http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28976849 There is also a blurb on the project on the Flickr blog http://tinyurl.com/mbndarg

I did have trouble trying to narrow a search to the Internet Archive books only. How to do that for best results is explained by Diane Haddad at the Genealogy Insider http://tinyurl.com/lnsox4m  Of course, you can go directly to the Internet Archive Book Images here http://tinyurl.com/ktnny46

And there is other news this past few weeks for 20th century historians to get excited about. Yale University has a new project that allows us to explore approximately 175,000 photographs of 1930s and 1940s America. Photogrammar is the name of a project with which we can really delve into the photographs taken by the Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information. http://photogrammar.yale.edu/

We are all familiar with this group of photos, but in the past we were unable to look at them on a map by state, by county, and by exactly where the photo was taken and by which photographer. Images can now be sorted by themes, and more new “tools” are being developed. Read more about it in this article that appeared in The Atlantic magazine at http://tinyurl.com/m57p5vr

On the map, I clicked on Irwin County, Georgia and I received a link to the 65 photos taken there by Arthur Rothstein, Carl Mydans, John Vachon, and Marion Post Wolcott. How exciting! This really is an easier way to get directly to the images taken in a particular county as well as to all those taken in your state and those taken by a particular photographer.

I love this image of the May queen and the girls doing the maypole dance at  the “May Day-Health Day” at Irwinville Farms, Georgia, there among the tall pines. Little says out loud “Georgia” to me more than our state’s piney woods.

Marion Post Wolcott. May queen and maypole dance at May Day-Health Day festivities at Irwinville Farms, Georgia, May 1939; FSA/OWI Collection, Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division;  LC-USF34-051644

I will close this post with a reminder about the fine work Kenneth R. Marks is doing on his “United States Online Historical Photos” portion of his blog, The Ancestor Hunt. He continually adds to, updates and refines these links to photographs available nation-wide.  And it really is “hundreds of links to millions of images.”  http://tinyurl.com/osjwdas

So, until next time (when I’ll tell you about some new-to-me Georgia photographers, and also some new information on those I have written about here) continue to enjoy your hunting and gathering and perhaps even use these newer, fun-to-discover images from these newer sources. Whatever you decide to do, have fun!

© E. Lee Eltzroth and Hunting & Gathering, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without  written permission from this blog’s author is prohibited. The piece can be re-blogged, and excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to E. Lee Eltzroth and Hunting & Gathering, with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.