Boston Public Library Historic Photographs on Flickr

Birthplace of John Adams, Quincy, Mass., taken 1929 by Leon Abdalian, originally uploaded by Boston Public Library.

We’ve become spoiled, and a little jaded, perhaps, by great resources like HABS and the New York Public Library’s on-line image collections but there’s a huge amount of newly digitized historic material still being put on the web. Yesterday, the Boston Public Library posted a fabulous collection of historic photographs on Flickr that deserves attention from architectural historians and others. It includes 781 photographs by Leon Abdalian, an Armenian immigrant who photographed sites in and around Boston between the 1910s and early 1950s. It includes a number of wintry landscape views but most images show significant buildings in the region, including the old and new Massachusetts State houses, Faneuil Hall, Richardson’s Trinity Church, and many many others. For anyone interested in the early architecture of eastern Massachusetts, or the colonial revival in New England, they are a marvelous resource.

At the moment, the images are well captioned but not tagged. It would be fantastic to have them geo-tagged, as well, but having them available digitally is a great start.

I’d love to know more about Abdalian himself, and the circumstances of these photographs. His day job was, apparently, driving a trolley but was he paid to make these expensive glass-plate negatives? If he was a hobbyist, shooting what was of interest, how did he choose his subjects? The buildings in the collection include some of the oldest in the Massachusetts Bay area, though he also recorded some sites that seem to have been of greater historical than architectural interest, like Benjamin Franklin’s birthplace.

It’s worth noting, as well, that the photographs in the collection are predominantly of 17th, 18th, and 19th-century buildings. There are very few images of contemporary architecture, which presumably reflects Abdalian’s preferences but perhaps also says something about the building culture of Boston in the first half of the twentieth century. The few early 20th-century buildings in the collection are predominantly Beaux-Arts civic structures. There is also a very nice series of religious buildings, including Old South Church and Temple Israel Synagogue in Boston, and a series of public monuments.

After you’ve looked over the Abdalian images, don’t miss the BPL’s Boston Stereographs collection.

Flickr as image backup

A good friend is a tenured scholar at a small school that does not routinely provide secure network storage space to its faculty. She described art and architecture students keeping their digital work on USB drives and revealed that her second book manuscript resides on her laptop and, occasionally, gets backed up onto a CD. Her digital images live exclusively on her hard drive.

I have gotten so used to debating the merits of tiffs vs jpegs and worrying about the archivability of word-processing and CAD files that I was astounded to learn that there was a degree-granting institution in North America that doesn’t provide even minimal network storage space to its faculty. Am I hopelessly out of touch? Is this, in fact, common? I do know that there are plenty of unaffiliated scholars (and tiny museums) who have to make do without IT support but I had assumed that network space went along with office space as the minimum provision for university-level teachers in 2008.

What do people recommend for those scholars whose work increasingly depends on digital files but who lack the institutional support to maintain them? Here I would include independent scholars, adjuncts, professors at small schools, and graduate students. This problem is especially acute, I suspect, for those of us who work on visual materials and have personal catalogs of digital photographs numbering in the many thousands.

What I suggested to my friend was, first of all, that she email her manuscript to her husband, so a copy gets onto her and his email servers, where it has a fighting chance. Second, I suggested that she start migrating her digital images to Flickr, which offers unlimited storage of image files under 20MB for $25 per year with its pro accounts. I also suggested she might invest a couple hundred dollars in a RAID backup, though this doesn’t get the files off site.

Is anyone else, besides my friend, losing sleep over this? What other solutions are out there?

And yes, I know about hard-disk recovery solutions, like this one, which saved my bacon once to the tune of $2400. But relying on this as a backup strategy is, well, short-sighted.

Excellent Tag Navigation Tool for Flickr

Tag Galaxy is a simple, elegant, visual browser for Flickr images, and much more intuitive than trying to search for images within Flickr itself (despite the helpfulness of Clusters). Follow the link, type a tag to start with, and start browsing or narrowing your selection as you wish. Results come up as a set of thumbnails applied to a slowly spinning globe, which can be selected to load the image in Flickr.

In five minutes of noodling around, I found an amazing collection of images of New Orleans buildings, here–it’s an ad hoc architectural survey that includes, at the moment, almost 1,500 images.  This is how the web is supposed to work: searching leads to browsing, which leads to discovery of new and marvelous resources you wouldn’t have found through a simple search. I didn’t know it existed, so I never would have thought to look for “New Orleans Architectural History Survey.” What a great project, and what a great tool that led me to it.