About Collections Online
Collections Online is a section of the Archives of American Art’s website designed to accommodate browsing, searching, and display of archival collections held by the Archives of American Art that have been digitized, for the most part, in their entirety. Included are papers of artists, dealers, critics and curators, comprising thousands of letters, photographs, diaries, sketches, writings, rare published materials, and other documents.
The development of Collections Online was made possible from a generous, six-year grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art awarded in 2005. By the end of the grant, 105 collections will be digitized. Those that have been digitized to date are listed and linked from the main Collections Online page.
Learn more about the Archives’ method of digitizing collections: Terra Foundation for American Art Digitization Project
Using Collections Online
“View Collection” Tab
Documents digitized and displayed in Collections Online are not described item-by-item but are viewed as groups of documents found in a specific folder. The folders occur within groupings called series, which are similar or related materials that are identified during archival processing. The folder title serves as the link to open the Image Viewer to view all the documents within the folder.
Folder listings will also list folders that have not been scanned. Items that are typically not scanned include published materials, duplicates or copies, or items with little research value, such as personal items of an artist’s descendants.
When a folder title link is selected, the Collections Online Image Viewer window will appear. The Image Viewer displays the digitized documents from each folder in thumbnail-sized images on the left, with the first image displayed in a reference-sized image in a larger window. Thumbnails appear in the order in which the originals are arranged, with front and back of documents in separate, adjacent images.
Click on the thumbnails to view each item in the larger window. Use the magnifying tool to the right of the window to zoom in and out, and click and hold the cursor on the image to drag and view different portions of the image. To view an item in a larger window, click on “Open in New Window.” This window will allow you to view the entire image at once, and to navigate to previous and next documents for that folder only.
Users can view images from subsequent folders by simply clicking “Next Folder” on the image viewer. The folder heading displayed at the top of the image viewer will indicate which folder is currently open, and the series in which the folder is found.
Archives staff have made every effort to ensure that items displayed in the image viewer are as legible as the original document, while balancing considerations of digital image size and system memory. On rare occasions, digital images of large, original documents with very small text are not large enough to be legible, even when zoomed in fully. On such occasions, researchers may request a larger image through the Archives Ask Us Form.
“About This Collection Tab”
Each collection’s “About This Collection” tab contains information about the content and context of the collection. Also called a finding aid to the collection, this is the information that has been compiled by the archivist, including:
- Size of the collection (expressed in linear feet, which is the amount of shelf space occupied by the original documents);
- Biographical or historical note, which provides a brief history of the individual or organization which created the collection and specific information about the origins of documents in the collection;
- Types of documents found in the collection;
- Subjects, events, individuals, and organizations documented in the collection;
- Arrangement of the documents in the collection;
- History or provenance of the collection; and
- Information about the way the collection has been processed at the Archives of American Art.
Search
In addition to browsing, all words and terms in Collections Online are indexed and can be searched using the search box in the upper right corner of website. Keywords are indexed directly from the archival finding aid that was written by the archivist who processed the collection. The digitized documents are not individually indexed nor have they undergone Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Therefore, words and terms are indexed solely from the archival finding aid for the collection.
Copyright Restrictions & Usage
If you have a question about copyright restrictions and usage, especially for publication purposes, please read the Archives’ Copyright Statement, and then contact our reference department using the Ask Us Form.
Related Website Resources
Search Images provides access to individually described and digitized items.
Collections & Interviews A-Z provides a list of the Archives’ holdings of approximately 6,000 collections.