Great Seattle Fire of 1889

I viewed a digital collection of images from the Great Seattle Fire of 1889. This fire burned 29 blocks of the city, including most of the business district, most of the wharves, and most of the railroad terminals. This collection is hosted at the University of Washington.

Selection decisions:

Considering that it documents a single historical event, this is a fairly extensive collection of artifacts related to the great fire. It contains about 160 black and white (or sepia toned) images, a handful of letters, and one book. UW appears to have digitized all the materials in its collection related to the fire.

Metadata:

The metadata is pretty cool because it is hyperlinked! So an image of "aftermath" automatically links to other aftermath-tagged images. Each image lists title, creator, date, notes, depicted location, order number, a link to ordering information, negative number, repository collection, object type, and digital reproduction information.

Object Characteristics:

This collection has been ingested/displayed with ContentDM so it looks familiar after last week's class. The images can be viewed as thumbnails, fifteen to a page. The object level page contains one image with the option to "zoom and pan" although it's not very robust and the images only get about 40% larger. Images can be added to favorites. Images contain alternate text but you can't tell what the file type is by checking the properties.

Intended Audience:

The photos don't enlarge enough to allow for true study of the actual images but a scholar interested in architecture, fire, or Seattle history would find at least find the collection interesting and informative.