with 1,819 photographs in 51 large-format albums,
ca. 1880–1893; and photographs produced and
gathered by George Grantham Bain, ca. 1900–
1931, for his news photo service, including por-
traits, worldwide news events, and New York
City (about 1,200 photographs may be seen online,
selected from the larger collection, with records
being added frequently).
Access
The Prints and Photographs Reading Room pro-
vides public access to the collections and services of
the Prints and Photographs Division and is open to
patrons conducting research in the Division’s col-
lections. The Prints and Photographs collections of
over 13.6 million images, including photographs,
fine and popular prints and drawings, posters, and
architectural and engineering drawings, is interna-
tional in scope; however, the collections are natu-
rally rich in images documenting the history of the
United States and the activities of citizens.
There is no comprehensive published catalog
describing the enormous collection of the Prints
and Photographs Division, and intellectual access
is complicated. Many materials are cataloged in
groups, with no itemized listing, and others are not
listed in a catalog, but rather are made available
through ‘‘browsing’’ files in the Reading Room. A
portion of the holdings is available on the Internet.
Of special interest are the over 650,000 items (as of
2001) from several of the Division’s collections that
are represented by catalog records and accompany-
ing digital images in the Prints and Photographs
Online Catalog; new records and digital images are
added continuously. Access to the online catalog, as
well as to illustrated guides, reference aids, and
other information about the Division’s collections
and services is available through the reading room’s
home page on the World Wide Web athttp://www.
loc.gov/rr/print/.
The Division has prepared guides, reference aids,
and finding aids for particular collections and popu-
larly requested topics, which often list images not yet
accessible through the online catalog. There are spe-
cialized reference aids, for instance, on ‘‘Women’s
Activities During the Civil War,’’ ‘‘Timber Frame
Houses,’’ and on the National Child Labor Com-
mittee photographs by Lewis Hine. Some of these
documents are accompanied by digitized images.
Access to the FSA-OWI negatives is now done
electronically via the Library’s Web site, and users
are often fascinated by the ‘‘killed’’ images which
were not printed during the life of the project,
whereas access to the prints is through a vertical
file in the Prints and Photographs Reading Room
and on microfilm surrogates. Many of the prints
were sorted into ‘‘lots’’ or groups arranged by
assignment or geographic location. Most of the
lots were microfilmed in order, after which they
were disassembled and refiled according to a deci-
mal classification scheme, involving numbered sub-
ject categories, developed by Paul Vanderbilt, who
had had prior experience with the collection as an
archivist for the OWI. His arrangement of ‘‘lots’’
and the FSA-OWI Reading Room File for the
agency was already implemented when the Library
received the collection with Vanderbilt as its cu-
rator. Vanderbilt apparently intended to interfile
images from non-FSA-OWI sources into the large
browsing file he had created, but such an expansion
was never implemented; in retrospect, most re-
searchers are probably relieved that this very spe-
cial collection is not encumbered or confused by
photographs from other sources. Even picture
researchers who are normally more interested in
the subject content of pictures than in their prove-
nance or creators realize the historical and practical
value of keeping this illustrious FSA-OWI archive
separate from other pictures of similar subjects.
Access to the lots by photographer, location, and
subject headings is provided by records in a card
catalog. The microfilm of approximately 1,800 lots
(400 lots were not microfilmed) preserves this initial
arrangement by assignment. A published set of
1,637 microfiches reproduces the FSA-OWI Read-
ing Room File: America 1935–1946: The Photo-
graphs of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Farm
Security Administration, and the U.S. Office of War
Information, Arranged by Region and by Subject.
The popular Web-based American Memory Pro-
ject was established in 1990 to begin sharing por-
tions of the Library’s Americana collections in
electronic form. Since the Prints and Photographs
Online Catalog generally includes only cataloging
implemented since the mid-1980s, images orga-
nized and described in prior decades are available
only by searching manual files in the Prints and
Photographs Reading Room. Some images are
described at the group level rather than the item
level, so many published images credited to the
Prints and Photographs Division may not yet be
available via the online catalog.
Full use of the collections in the Prints and Pho-
tographs Reading Room requires the help of staff
familiar with the Division’s varied systems of cata-
loging and finding aids and who supervise the safe,
appropriate use of disparate materials. SpecialLIBRARY OF CONGRESS