This is an archive of photographs by Carleton Watkins at the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology, UC Berkeley. He was a 19th century photography who is best known for his landscapes of the Pacific Northwest and California. The online archive is put together by the Online Archive of California, which pulls from collections of universities, libraries, museums and other cultural institutions in California.
The online collection contains 140 photos; the entire Watkins collection that UC Berkeley owns is digitized and available online. Not all archived collections hosted by OAC are digitized, but it seems to me that all the photographs--whether entire collections or just one item in a collection--are digitized.
As this is a formal archive, there is an entire finding aid with information pertinent to the whole collection, including collection summary, repository information, access info, publication rights, preferred citation, acquisition information, biography and scope and content notes. Each image is labeled with title and number, identifier, collection, and home institution.
Each image was created from the Phoebe Hearst Museum originals which "were copied onto 35mm color transparency film; the film was scanned and transferred to Kodak Photo CD (by Custom Process); and the Photo CD files were color-corrected and saved in JFIF (JPEG) format for use as viewing files." Each image can be viewed as a thumbnail, medium resolution, or high resolution. Each is also photographed with a gray scale and CMY scale.
I think Carleton Watkin's photographs would appeal to any one interested in art, especially landscape, and historic photography, and even people studying historical geography. The OAC archive is formally done, making it very scholarly but still very accessible to anyone.
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