Kheel Center Labor Photos

Project Overview

Goals

The main goals of this project are to support the teaching and research needs of the School of Industrial and Labor Relations; to increase the visibility of the Kheel Center's photographic collections; to provide more direct user access to a large selected sample of images with item-level data; to reduce handling of original negatives and prints and the damage that accompanies such handling; and to streamline permissions and reproduction ordering.

Database development

The images and related data found in this database represent selections made by the Kheel Center Media Curator which we hope will serve a wide array of researchers' needs. Other collections will be evaluated on an ongoing basis and selected images will be scanned, documented, and added to the database as time permits and as research needs dictate.

The International Ladies Garment Workers Union photograph collection (5780 P) is the first group of images to be scanned and documented, and thus it has served to guide database design and development. It includes approximately 20 linear feet of images spanning the 20^th Century and, because of its breadth of subject matter and the specificity of its finding aid, has been our most heavily used image collection.

Selecting images

Photographs included in the database were selected from much larger collections. While complying with copyright and other restrictions, they represent only a portion of the collection's images of a particular individual, group, location, or event, selected by the Center's Media Curator for the likelihood of their value to researchers. In many cases the photographs chosen are almost identical to one or more others which are not found in the database. In order to save resources we have scanned the image which we feel is the best representative of the group. While we hope that you will find images in this database that suit your project, similar photos of the same subject that have not been included may contain more of the information you need. Please contact us to discuss your research interests, and to determine if other images in our collection may prove useful.

Scanning

Images have been scanned on one of two Microtek scanners, the Scanmaker 3 or the Scanmaker 8700. In each case, our earliest generation image, whether print or negative, was scanned and adjusted using Adobe Photoshop, rendering a surrogate image as close to the original photograph's brightness and contrast as possible. Though more data may be made available in some images by enhancing these variables, our intent is to reproduce the photograph held by the Center as closely as possible. Most images are scanned at 400 dpi resolution and saved as tiff files. Please contact us if you wish to discuss custom scanning.