Photomuse

Photomuse: A Collection collaboration from the George Eastman House and the International Center of Photography was funded by the IMLS. It is a site for the history of photography.

Collection Principles
While each institution puts on their own exhibitions, they work together to create the online resource. The International Center of Photography started in 1974 and includes documentary photography that, "supports the dignity of mankind." In addition, the ICP attempts to document the history of photography and includes daguerreotypes, real photo postcards, and iris prints. The George Eastman House includes landmark photographs, also on the history of photography. Both are attempting to put up exhibits together that demonstrate the major figures and processes in the history of photos.

Object Characteristics
The objects are photographs: plates and prints. They have been scanned in from the original. There is also some born-digital information available which I will discuss more under the Metadata heading. The photographs can be viewed as thumbnails under the exhibitions pages, or can be zoomed in on to about 400 x 500.

Metadata
There are 4 main sections of the site: about, search, chronology, and exhibitions. The about section contains information that I have already included above. The search section is a pretty advanced option, you can search by year, description, or title, among others. But I couldn't figure out a way to search broadly, I had to pick some conditions. The chronology section appears to be born-digital history information. The exhibitions section contains most of the browsing-available photos. When you click on a specific exhibition a second window pops up with a tab for the photographs, a tab with an introduction to the exhibit and its meaning, and a tab with resources, which seems to be miscellaneous additional info. Each photo is accompanied by what the original medium was and the size, as well as the creator, a description, and which collection it belongs to.

Audience
Students, both academic and general public are invited to use the Web site. According to their about page, "Thanks to the Internet and the World Wide Web, museums have an opportunity to serve audiences that do not have easy access to our buildings and collections."