Tuesday, August 28, 2012
A Photographic Mystery: An Anonymous Picture of a Woman in the 1869 Senate Album
Sometimes a little mystery makes a project all the more interesting! In a recent blog entry, I reported on our newly digitized legislative photograph collection and some of the characteristics I observed. Since then, I have been working ardently on creating and fixing metadata that will be attached to each photograph. Although the project is moving along pretty smoothly, some snags are to be expected—namely trying to identify unidentified legislators, officers of the court, and other images included within the collection. I’ve been largely successful with the bound Senate albums, relying greatly on the relationship between the order of the pictures in the album and the senators’ seating arrangements found in the Manuals of the General Court, but I am finding that the loose photographs are incredibly difficult to identify.