Dry Drunk

Dry Drunk at the NYPL chronicles tobacco's rise in popularity subsequent to European explorers "discovery" of the Americas. The exhibit discusses the history of its use and abuse.

The collection includes mostly etchings, wood engravings, and broadsides scanned from books.

Selection decisions:
The NYPL has a large collection relating to the history of tobacco. The online collection summarizes 101 historical items. The selections have been culled from a handful of physical NYPL collections, including the Rare Books Division and the Arents Tobacco Collection. They have selected items that fit well within the chosen browsing categories: Travel, Herbals, Debate, Gender, Costume, High Life, Low Life, Politics, Sneezing, and Allegory. It is not clear what percentage of the total tobacco holdings are represented.

Metadata:
The descriptive metadata includes as much information as they have regarding creator, title, medium, date, city, parent collection, and caption. There is no information on capture methods.

Object characteristics:
Digital images are available for roughly 1/3 of the 101 catalogued objects. The thumbnails are fairly uniform in size and all in jpeg format. Each may be enlarged one level, some as large as 700 pixels, others as small as 250 pixels. The enlarged images are also jpegs. There is no alternate text for images. The site contains no information on master file formats.

Intended Audience:
The introduction outlines the users of the site as scholars of literature, history, art history, the history of the book, and the sciences.