Image Archive on the American Eugenics Movement This archive contains both virtual exhibits in Flash Players and a search utility to locate photographs by unique ID, object type, time period, or topic.
1) Selection
The archive is a compilation of materials from a variety of museums and archives, including the American Philosophical Society, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Archives, and the International Center of Photography, and eight others. The site is hosted by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Before searching the image database the visitor must agree to the conditions of use – for educational and research purposes only. The materials included were all sought out and included because of their affiliation with the eugenics movement. The images include scanned documents and photographs.
2) Metadata
Each image has a unique ID, the date (year) it was originally taken (for photographs) or written (for documents). Topics are listed for each image as is a short paragraph explaining the relevance of the item. It’s really comprehensive! In this case the descriptive metadata and structural metadata is fairly strong - each image references its collection.
3) Object Characteristics
Since the entire collection is in Flash, it’s hard to get too much information about each object. It is apparent that the materials are scanned at a high resolution because the visitor can zoom in quite closely and the image quality is excellent. To get more information you can click to see an image in a printer-friendly format, which will then allow you to print or save the image.
4) Audience
This image archive is obviously for educational and research purposes, so its intended audience is academia.
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