Dr Verlon Stone, Indiana University
2007 award – major research project
£38,491 for 24 months
The project aims to conserve, organise and digitise approximately 6,500 unique Tubman-era photographs, containing the only extant visual records of a major period in Liberian history and its role in the African pre- and post-independence era. Official government photographers with direct access to Tubman shot most of these images. With these photographs, researchers can reconstruct key events, validate oral and written accounts, and perform spatial analysis of personal relationships.
All the photographs are currently stored in Indiana University’s archival storage facilities, having been shipped over to the E. Lingle Craig Preservation Laboratory at Indiana University with the collection of President Tubman’s personal papers, the subject of a separate project funded by EAP. 2,000 photographs were cleaned at the time the Tubman papers were cleaned in 2005-06. The remainder are unprocessed, but stabilized in an archival freezing unit. Problems included staining and discoloration and sticking between stacked photographs. Some images have missing areas, destroyed by insects or from wet emulsion left sticking to adjacent surfaces. All photographs are capable of being flattened for digitizing on a flat-bed scanner.
The project will :
- Develop a web-based image metadata cataloging tool for viewing and describing the digitized images in order to efficiently assign identifications, key words and descriptors in the database.
- Develop a web-based searchable database, with a results page that includes thumbnails linked to a larger, viewable image.
- Restore damp and damaged photographs to a condition where they can be digitized.
(The above three elements will be funded from alternative sources.)
- Digitise 6,500 photographs (most black-and-white: mainly 8 x 10 and 5 x 7 inches with some smaller and larger formats).
- Restore any digitised photographs to enable easier identification during interviews. This will be in addition to the preservation copy of the digital images, which will be as close to the condition of the original photographs as possible. (Preliminary survey indicates only a moderate number of photos require this kind of corrective work.)
- Interview Liberians and other people knowledgeable about the Tubman era to correctly identify individuals in photographs.
- Resolve Intellectual Property issues to ensure non-restricted use of these photographs. About 70% of the photographs include agency or photograph identification.
This project has the full written support of the Tubman family and the Liberian government and the photographs will be returned to Liberia at the end of the project. In addition, two workstations loaded with the project’s digitized Tubman photographs and printers will be transported to two designated Liberian educational or archival institutions. DVDs with the digitised photographs may be supplied to additional institutions.
