A couple of new developments. First, I have reorganized the first 100 scanned images into a categorical format. You will now find a landing-point Photographs page with links to various albums arranged by topic. Right now, the sub-pages are also visible in the drop-down menu, but I'm not sure whether to continue that approach, especially if the list of categories grows to a cumbersome length. However, I am finding that, back when photography was more challenging and more expensive, people tended to takes pictures of a limited number of categories. Floods were very popular subjects. I myself have a strange compulsion to whip out my iPhone when the river is roaring and take pictures that never quite seem to capture the awe-inspiring force of the Kennebec in flood. Schools, teams, class pictures, and major construction projects are also popular topics.
I am having to recreate all the captions, so many of the photos don't have them yet. The captions consist of little more than the file number I am assigning to images as I scan them and transfer them to correspondingly numbered acid-free folders, and a few words describing the image content so I can quickly sense what's in them when looking at huge lists of jpegs on the computer file directory. It will, for now, be beyond the scope of the captions, and my abilities, to develop extensive histories or descriptions for each photo. Hopefully, interested and knowledgeable individuals will, over time, be drawn to the site and the effort and participate in research and investigation of some of the images. Perhaps school classes, with the assistance of the many grants available from Maine Historical Society for such projects, may take on the challenge. Many of the images, with proper documentation, are wonderful for submission to the Maine Memory Network, where, I remind you, we have catalogued and submitted 37 images that are online.
Secondly, I have finally begun scanning in earnest again. I've scanned about 30 images in the past two days and hope to continue spending a little time each evening (from 30 minutes to an hour) digitizing a few more images. The original scans, which are being archived to DVD-Rs, are TIFF files of 40mb file size on average - per MMN guidelines. What you see on this site are compressed JPEGs of around 1mb each. The images on MMN are JPEGs, but are probably about 6-7mb files with much higher resolution than this site.
In the weeks ahead, I will begin uploading some of the new 2013 scans to this site. Stand by. There's some very interesting stuff, beginning with images of Bay Street in the 1920s and the relocation of the Sebasticook auto bridge in 1959, kindly contributed by Mr. Jean Roy. Here's a teaser:
I am having to recreate all the captions, so many of the photos don't have them yet. The captions consist of little more than the file number I am assigning to images as I scan them and transfer them to correspondingly numbered acid-free folders, and a few words describing the image content so I can quickly sense what's in them when looking at huge lists of jpegs on the computer file directory. It will, for now, be beyond the scope of the captions, and my abilities, to develop extensive histories or descriptions for each photo. Hopefully, interested and knowledgeable individuals will, over time, be drawn to the site and the effort and participate in research and investigation of some of the images. Perhaps school classes, with the assistance of the many grants available from Maine Historical Society for such projects, may take on the challenge. Many of the images, with proper documentation, are wonderful for submission to the Maine Memory Network, where, I remind you, we have catalogued and submitted 37 images that are online.
Secondly, I have finally begun scanning in earnest again. I've scanned about 30 images in the past two days and hope to continue spending a little time each evening (from 30 minutes to an hour) digitizing a few more images. The original scans, which are being archived to DVD-Rs, are TIFF files of 40mb file size on average - per MMN guidelines. What you see on this site are compressed JPEGs of around 1mb each. The images on MMN are JPEGs, but are probably about 6-7mb files with much higher resolution than this site.
In the weeks ahead, I will begin uploading some of the new 2013 scans to this site. Stand by. There's some very interesting stuff, beginning with images of Bay Street in the 1920s and the relocation of the Sebasticook auto bridge in 1959, kindly contributed by Mr. Jean Roy. Here's a teaser:
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