Image Browsing at WA Digital Archives!

Boeing 314 Clipper, with Mt. Rainier in the background, ca. 1945

The latest upgrade to the Washington State Digital Archives (my employer, BTW) makes all the photographs and audio records browseable for the first time. Hooray! Here is a list of the photographic collections we currently have online. If you click on any collection you will be taken to a collection description and a search page. From the search page click on "Browse all records in the collection" to open a browsable page of the photographs. Though browsing also works in any results for a search for photographs.

The browsing interface--designed by WSDA employees Adam Miller and Bryan Smith--is slick. Click on any image and it pops up with a descriptive caption, a link to a page with all the meta data and a larger image, and arrows to browse forward or back in the collection. The old system produced only text results for image searches, and you would have to click through two screens to see the images, and two back to return to the search results.

Browsable photographs make the Digital Archives more usable to the citizens of Washington State. And to your humble blogger. As I explore the collections I will share additional photos such as the one above.