viz.

Image Credit: Joseph Shelderfer 

During November and December I'll be devoting some blog posts to reviews of image archives recently added to the viz. "Images" resource page. First up is the gallery from the New York City Department of Records released in April 2012. The archive "provides free and open research access to over 800,000 items digitized from the Municipal Archives’ collections, including photographs, maps, motion-pictures and audio recordings." It is from the research perspective that I approach this review. Alan Taylor, at The Atlantic's photography blog In Focus, included some highlights he found while browsing the archive (warning: images include evidence photography from homicide crime scenes). Browsing through the images is certainly a good way to spend some time (perhaps too much time), but the archive is also organized through a series of collections that can help the viewer sift through the nearly one million images from the Big Apple.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

The following post concerns my recent visits to the Hazel H. Ransom Reading Room at the Harry Ransom Center. The images, such as the one above, were derived from unpublished scholarly notes that I never would have found if I didn't use a card catalogue. Since I have been in the process of writing my dissertation in the Department of English Literature, the resources at the Harry Ransom Center have guided me toward avenues of research I did not initially expect to pursue. I would like to relate a personal narrative and a few thoughts about why I’ve enjoyed accessing the Center’s extensive and rich archive by means of the card catalogues. The views expressed below do not reflect those of the Center, but are entirely my own. I do not write from the point of view of a library scientist, although I might gesture toward their expertise in my personal reflections on old-fashioned metadata. Instead, I hope to reassert what many students at the University of Texas already know, concerning the advantage of our proximity to the Harry Ransom Center. Specifically, I would like to suggest the need to actually visit the Reading Room to realize the full extent of the possibilities for research there.