Tuesday, May 12, 2009

The Winterton College of East African Photographs: 1860-1960

The Winterton College of East African Photographs: 1860-1960

http://www.library.northwestern.edu/africana/winterton/

The website of the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies at Northwestern University offers visitors to its site a digital feast of images of East Africa from 1860-1960. A portion of the Winterton Collection of East African photographs, acquired by the library at the end of 2002, has already been digitized, and the entire collection of photographs has been inventoried and is available in a PDF document, under the Inventory tab. The photographs currently available on the website are divided into album views and individual sample images from the collection. The sample images are a mixture of landscapes and portraits, both formal and informal. By clicking on a photograph, a visitor can see a larger image of the photograph, as well as a caption that includes a date, location, and description, if known. The album view, with its black background and white text, extremely high quality image scans, and excellent organization makes it easy to navigate and enjoy. The photographs were scanned directly from the albums' pages, so a visitor almost feels as if they are paging through the physical albums. The photographs' original captions are legible in the albums when the photograph is magnified, but are also reprinted underneath the albums, with no zooming required.

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