Yesterday and today, I am working to scan the entire collection of historical photography for the Hyde Park Free Library. There is a plethora of images, documenting various areas of town. I'm making the transition from analog material to digital, as a part of the efforts to collect material for the project.
The photographs have been previously archived. To identify each image, they gave it a letter and number ID. P-37 or JRFL-272. My guess is that these reference people. Will have to dig further into this.
While scanning, I continue to think about who is documenting the life in Hyde Park now? At some point an individual put effort into collecting these images and had the forsight to donate them to the library for safe keeping. My guess is that this is no longer the case. Images are property and they are private. That is until they are given over to some public institution. Hmmm - I'm hoping that I can fill in material from this collection to the present. That is the major hurdle of this effort.
Maybe this is now the job of Flickr? I'm going to have to do some searching on the web for images. Why not go to Flickr and talk to them about local history collections???
