Soviet Poster Collection

This week, I looked at Swarthmore College's Soviet Poster Collection. It is a collection of Soviet propaganda posters from three different periods of active collection for the purpose of building Swarthmore College's Peace Collection. About half of the posters refer to maternal and child health issues, and the other half promote Stalin's Five Year Plans. This is part of the Triptych digitization project of Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Swarthmore Universities.

Selection Decisions: They've seemingly digitized the entire collection, as far as I can tell from the collection description. They've digitized posters of all conditions, so preservation doesn't appear to be a primary motivation. The Peace Collection itself was created for the purpose of promoting peaceful social action strategies by displaying artifacts of such action around the world (apparently, the collectors weren't yet aware of how Stalin went about enacting his Plans), so I might guess that this collection has been digitized to increase awareness of the project and collection.

Metadata: The metadata is very descriptive for each poster. The database provides the English translation of the entire text on the poster, along with as many descriptive facts as known about the item. In addition, it also provides the condition and location of the original. The majority of key words in the description are links which take the user to a search of that specific keyword within the collection, which I think is a really useful tool. Unfortunately, it's not possible to search by any Russian keywords, so if anyone is interested in doing a more exact search for Russian language use, this database is not useful. Also, there is no specific metadata about the digital object, like pixel specifics, or about the project itself.

Characteristics of the Digital Object: The big disappointment of this digitization project is that it's not possible to enlarge the images, and the quality of the scans is generally low, so there's a huge loss of clarity. Many of these posters have lots of small print that it is impossible to see with the image quality that's provided. So, if a user is researching to read the Russian text or view the detail of the pictures, this site is largely not of use. Any really in-depth study would thus require hands-on contact with the original.

Intended Audience: As I mentioned above, the intended audience of the Peace Collection is probably the general public, with the purpose of educating about social change. I would say that this collection would be useful for scholars of history, women's studies, and Russian studies, but the low quality of imaging doesn't ever allow for really in-depth study. So, this is probably just a general exhibit about certain social issues within Soviet history.