Kathy Whalen
Kathy Whalen
The student's voice grew animated as she described why she wanted to look through the photographs in the College Archives. She was working, she explained, on a semester-long printmaking project that was going to focus on architecture on campus. Did we have any photographs that would show architectural details of the buildings around campus? Over the next two days she searched through hundreds of photos, setting aside any that showed the unusual stonework and interesting patterns present in so many of Bryn Mawr's buildings. After hours of patient searching she finally selected fifteen images that she could use.
The photograph collection gets many such requests: "What do you have on past presidential inaugurations?" "I’d like to see some photos of students from the '50s and '60s." "Do you have any pictures of students protesting?" In a collection of over 10,000 images, finding an answer often requires hours of patient research.
Over the next year much of this arduous searching will become a thing of the past. Using database software and a brand-new Pentium computer, the staff of the Special Collections Department has begun to compile a searchable catalog of the photographs in the collection. When completed, the database will include names, places, dates, and digital reproductions of these images, and will allow patrons to look through a CD-ROM "virtual-catalog" of every image in the collection. Besides making subject-specific searches like the ones described above fast and accurate, this catalog will enable librarians to track more accurately which images have been used, how often and by whom. Photographs used for lectures or presentations will be able to be marked so that someone giving a similar lecture will easily be able to retrieve a listing of suitable photos. Equally important, this database will save the photographs themselves from the wear and tear of frequent handling and will allow conservation needs to be carefully monitored.
This collection is a treasure-trove of images vividly documenting life on campus. From the stiffly-posed grouping of students and faculty that made up the first class in 1886 to last year's snapshots of Student Service Day, over one hundred years of college life are recorded in as many boxes. Photographs include early carte-de-visite cards showing portraits of serious young women, often in cap and gown. Many of these popular cards were made by the Broadbent Company, a prominent Philadelphia firm, so that a student might have a visual record of her college experience for her family and friends. Early scenes of the campus are also preserved, including a series of easily recognizable blue-toned cyanotypes of the "great snowstorm of 1905" and a more tranquil albumen print of a snowy winter's day. In the latter photo, on page 5, "the Lantern Man" on his evening rounds provides a compelling glimpse of days gone by as he walks down a path now replaced by Rockefeller Arch.
Campus events&emdash;plays, basketball games, May Days, and commencements&emdash;are captured in these boxes, as are important occasions in the history of the College. A shovel-wielding Katharine McBride at the ground-breaking ceremony for the Park Science Building is only one of hundreds of photos which visually recall the McBride era. Photography also documents the construction of many of the buildings on campus. Pictures of Rhodes Hall immediately following its construction have been consulted extensively by the architects working on the current renovation project. The collection also includes candid shots of distinguished visitors; Robert Frost, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Marianne Moore not only all visited the campus, but are preserved as part of the visual record in the Archives. Queen Elizabeth of Belgium, on a 1914 visit to campus, rests beside the contemporary musician Shawn Colvin here just a few years ago for a concert.
But perhaps most compelling of all are the photograph albums. Glued to the often fragile, thick black leaves of each album are photographs that offer a personalized record of a single young woman’s college experience. These albums, which range from the earliest years of the College’s existence up to the '40s, reveal a narrative of what campus life was like. They are set apart from the rest of the collection not only by the number of candid photos of friends and teachers caught at work and play, but, in many of the albums, by the addition of captions, carefully written in white ink against the black page. One especially delightful album, the gift of L. Linn Killough Buss '47, vividly depicts the life of a Bryn Mawr Geology major. In one snapshot, two young women, dressed in the skirts and sweaters so popular in the late forties, stand outdoors, examining an open rock face. Below the photo, with a bright yellow pen, Linn has identified her classmates and then written, "The nicest way to spend a lab period." Photographs of step sings and May Days are intermingled with laughing young women fording creeks, exploring caves, and posing dramatically on rock faces, reminding us of Bryn Mawr's long-standing reputation for training first-rate geologists.
With literally thousands of images as fascinating as the ones described above, Special Collections librarians have long desired greater accessibility for the collection. In the course of this cataloging project, each photograph in the collection will be given an identification number, cataloged, scanned, and then placed in an acid-free envelope. At the same time, photographs that need preservation, due to either age or over-use, will be identified and set aside for further attention. When the project is complete, the Library will have a more accurate assessment of its photographic holdings, and patrons will have a valuable new resource.