Study of the Spanish-Speaking People of Texas

Study of the Spanish-Speaking people of Texas, at the Center for American History at the University of Texas, is a collection of 900+ photographs taken in 1949 in Corpus Christi, San Angelo, San Antonio, and El Paso by Russell E. Lee.

Selection

As the site explains, this photographic project was commissioned by George Sanchez and all 900+ images were digitized.

Metadata

Again, as the site explains (it’s great about providing a lot of information and transparency about the entire project): “Administrative data includes custodial history of the collection, reprographic rights, resource location, selection criteria, and funding sources. Descriptive data includes subject classification, key words, and links to finding aids. Technical data includes hardware, software, file formats, compression ratios, and image enhancement.” Item level images in the Spanish-Speaking people site contain only title (where applicable), date (always 1949), and caption. It’s interesting to note that Russell Lee images in the finding aid, which don’t appear to include any crossover with the Spanish-Speaking people site, although they may in the future, contains more extensive metadata at the item level: title, city, state, country, date, creator, source, publisher, rights, location, folder, frame/page, identifier, format, and subjects.

The site also notes that, although they encoded all images in TEI, VRA, and MODS, the library’s server networks cannot manipulate data encoded in those forms so it is currently only in the metadata registry using Dublin Core.

Object Characteristics

Yet again, as described on the site: “Master images were scanned with an Imacon Flextight 848 simulated drum scanner, with a batch adapter. The Russell Lee images were scanned in RGB at 16 bits per channel in order to capture maximum detail. To retain the three channels of the RGB, but provide a black and white image without a color cast, a monochrome adjustment was applied with Photoshop CS. This process was performed on all 923 images.

“Two versions—Archival TIFF and Publication TIFF files—of each master image were created from the raw data captured by the Imacon scanner. The derivatives—reference images and thumbnails—were created from the Publication TIFFs. Using Photoshop 7, the reference images were converted to JPEGs, compressed between 2% to 25% of the originals, resulting in a 300 dpi resolution and 24 bit depth. The reference images and linked assets for the Web site have been saved on various servers, and backed up to magnetic tape. “

Intended Audience

There are lesson plans developed based on the materials for seventh graders and eleventh graders. Otherwise, the collection will appeal to Texas historians, social historians, photographers and artists. The images can not be enlarged enough to facilitate serious photography research but they are good enough for lots of other purposes.