November 20, 2003
Find King County photos on new Web site
A unique collection of historical images of King County is now available online, the result of a collaboration involving the UW and 11 other cultural heritage organizations.
King County Snapshots, http://www.kcsnapshots.org, is a collection of 12,000 images in a searchable database. Users can search by keyword, by agency, or they can explore the database through a series of guided searches. Lead organizations for the project are the UW and the Museum of History and Industry.
The database is the culmination of work done in the past two years under a leadership grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
Bringing all the groups together was a challenge, according to Ann Lally, head of digital initiatives at UW Libraries. “Some of the partners in this project don’t have any staff, just volunteers,” she said. “Nevertheless, they had collections that were worth including in the database.”
Lally attributes the success of the project to a “fabulous” project manager, Rachel Howard, and two full-time metadata specialists, who analyzed the collections and found ways to facilitate retrieval of the images. The grant also permitted the partners to come together for a series of workshops, dealing with subjects such as how to organize the information, how to link their Web sites to their KCSnapshots database, and image fulfillment — what to do when someone requests a copy of a photograph for reproduction.
Users can visit the site and type in particular words or topics that interest them, or they can rely on a series of categories developed by the metadata specialists, to look, for example, across the entire database for photos showing the effects of earthquakes (or other disasters) in the county.
The smaller organizations received help from the UW in creating Web sites. The project manager had to assure that each organization actually owned the rights to the images that it planned to display. Finally, the scanning of images was outsourced, with each organization receiving a CD with the scanned images. The project used off-the-shelf software developed in partnership with local startup company DiMeMa, headed by Greg Zick of the Electrical Engineering Department.
All information is stored on UW servers, which makes backup and maintenance easier. With the grant set to expire in December, the partners are seeking funds to extend their cooperation.
Already, the project, which went online just a few weeks ago, is receiving inquiries from around the country. And the UW recently received another grant to create an online community museum of Olympic Peninsula heritage, including six online exhibitions during the next two years.
Organizations participating in King County Snapshots include the Black Heritage Society of Washington State, Inc.; Eastside Heritage Center; Maple Valley Historical Society; Northwest Railway Museum; Puget Sound Maritime Historical Society; Rainier Valley Historical Society; Renton Historical Museum; Shoreline Historical Museum; White River Valley Museum; and Wing Luke Asian Museum.
