Thursday, May 8, 2008

Digital Images Online at the Beinecke Library


Beinecke's Digital Images Online offers approximately 70,000 images of a wide range of materials from throughout the Beinecke Collections: photographs, manuscripts, correspondence, artwork, objects, illustrations, and selected pages from printed works . . . Approximately 1200 images are added every two weeks. About 20,000 images are scanned images from the Beinecke's Photonegative File, which contains negatives and color transparences of images selected for reproduction or study by patrons over the last twenty years.

The site is well-designed, with a powerful search engine and the ability to display results as a gallery or slideshow. You can link directly to the images and once you find something you can see all the images in a given set. Yale patrons can create an account and save items, but the rest of us can use the direct link and a service such as Del.icio.us to do the same thing.

The above image of Spokane Falls in 1879 is from the delightfully titled Oregon and the Pacific Northwest. Glimpses of Pretty Spots Along the Valley of the Columbia River (1879) by Isaac Grundy Davidson. Here are the other images in the volume. Though the collection is at Yale the Northwest and West is surprisingly well represented--try searches for Seattle, bison, or salmon for some delightful images.

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