Fashion Plate Collection

This week I'm looking at the Fashion Plate Collection at the University of Washington's Library's Special Collection Digital Collection.


http://content.lib.washington.edu/costumehistweb/index.html

The items in the collection come from Payne Blanche, who was a professor of apparel and costume at the univeristy. The items are mostly hand colored engravings and lithographs spanning a vareity of eras and countires. There are 417 plates digitized. They say that the complete collection is not digitized, however they do not say how many items are in the actual collection, so it is hard to tell if this is a small or large portion of the collection. It does seem to have a sampling from each subject area within the collection though.

The metadata is very complete. Each item has title, publisher, place, date, original source, notes (such as transcription of image captions), keyword links, LC subject headings, historical period links, digital collection title, number, ordering/reproduction information, repository collection, object type, physical description, and finally transmission data (how and when it was scanned).

Each object is described in its original form (such as type of print, by whom, when, where, size) and in its digital form (most seem to be scanned at 150 dpi in JPEG format, resized to about 768x600 ppi). From the homepage of the collection there is a page called "about the database" which states: "The images were scanned in color using a Microtek Scanmaker 9600L and saved in .jpg format. Some manipulation of the images was done to present the clearest possible digital image. The scanned images were then linked with descriptive data using the UW Content program." The only problem with the digital objects, for me, is that they aren't big enough! There is a zoom feature, but you can't go beyong 100% and this image just isn't quite large enough to see much detail.

The audience is the general public. Unlike U Penn's collection which I looked at last week, this UW's collections seem to be fully available to anyone, not just university associates. They make it very easy for anyone to use and I think this would be a very good place to get an overview of the topic and a general understanding of the fashion of these eras. This site makes it possible and easy to do further research. Anyone wishing to do in depth studies would have to contact the university to order reproductions or go to the library to see the real thing, as the digital images aren't quite big enough.