Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online Catalog

This post was originally published on May 28 2014

Migrant Mother. Dorothea Lange, 1936. From the Farm Security collection.

by Angela Terrab

It’s a catalog! No, it’s a digital gallery! No, it’s both, and a resource guide to boot! The Library of Congress’s Prints & Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC) is a marvel of both depth and breadth, and a must-see for students, researchers, and American history buffs.

As a catalog, the PPOC displays the detailed and diligent metadata one expect of the nation’s premier library, with full MARC records for 95% of the collections 14 million holdings. To do the math, that’s records for 13.3 million images, covering an enormous breadth of American visual history:

The collections of the Prints & Photographs Division include photographs, fine and popular prints and drawings, posters, and architectural and engineering drawings. While international in scope, the collections are particularly rich in materials produced in, or documenting the history of, the United States and the lives, interests and achievements of the American people.

Dan Sullivan card from the Prints and Photographs featured collection on baseball cards.

More than just a catalog, though, the PPOC contains embedded images for over 1.2 million listings. While this only begins to scratch the collection overall, it is more than enough to provide access to a rich digital gallery. Many records, especially in the featured collections, contain either thumbnail or full-size downloadable images.

In addition to item-level cataloging, there are in-depth collection descriptions for 70+ collections, covering such Americana from baseball cards to Spanish Civil War posters. Collection-level information contains essay-style narrative on the historical context, a bibliography of resources on the topic, and rights information for the images on display. Select collections also contain detailed information on original formatting and the digitization process. (See, for instance, the information on Mammoth Plate Photographs and digitization connected to the Detroit Publishing Company collection.)

While this site is not as updated or visually polished as standouts like the New York Public Library Digital Collections, it is well-organized and fairly intuitive to navigate, with a prominently located search field and navigation links in the page-left sidebar. After all, the PPOC is a self-described catalog, and it certainly offers users this functionality. Everything extra is just cherry.

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