Blast from the Past

Well, here begins my second official blog entry...
Actually, perhaps I should put this off for a couple more hours; I've had a sudden urge to take a break, have some tea and, whad'you know! American Idol is on!

I'm back...and this is the real thing! I managed to stumble upon a great photo site...actually it was less a stumble and more a pre-meditated search for a site worthy of my viewing and reviewing. The lucky site ended up being the US Library of Congress "Prints and Photographs Reading Room" - http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/catalog.html. (A point of note is that I found this link via the one and only National Geographic Traveler site - http://www.nationalgeographic.com/traveler/photos/photosites0701.html).

Yeah, yeah, I know the site sounds severely aimed at old dudes with glasses and tweed jackets. But hey, give the poor site a chance. The Reading Room is a blast from the past - there's literally thousands of images, photos, prints, cartoons from the last couple of centuries - a digitized archive of images at your fingertips. Of course, there's no shortage of additional information to accompany each image - the title, any captions, the medium of the original / existing print, the creator, the time or estimated time frame in which the image was created, where the originals are kept or what collection they are part of, info on how to get copies and any rights and restrictions applied, and related subjects. And of course there are links, links and, did I mention links? So if you see images of a creator you like, you can immediately get linked to a list of other images by the same person. Of course there's all sorts of other info...catalogue numbers and other numbers and nitty gritty blither blather that is probably critically important to researchers who need to document or find stuff. Anyway, all the info that's random to most is not actually distracting.

Now, aesthetics.....I have to say the site's not much to look at, as ironic as that is for an image gallery. But hey! We are people not seduced by the superficial....we will look beyond, and discover that despite lack of aesthetic appeal, this site has got all you need to navigate pretty darn easily. Yeah, there's a bunch of words around that don't seem important...but everything you need stands out just fine- "Search" "View" "Next" "Start Over" "Help". Type in any name, subject, place, whatever. The searching is easy and fast. Lists of images can be viewed as thumbnails instead of one at a time. There are even links to download tiff files of some images...although it takes long and my impatience did not permit me to see if any rights and restriction warnings would pop up at any point.

So anyways, short story long, this is just a good solid, Nil-approved site. You gotta love nostalgic imagery; pretty amazing stuff we have to live up to, and they made them with eggs too! As Zhana would say, "that's crazy man!"

NIL, OUT