This meeting has passed and is now available as a recording—you can find the YouTube video below.

In the fall of 2019, longtime PHSNE member Paul Rheingold donated his extensive collection of historic photographs to the Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA) at UMass Amherst. Nearly simultaneously, librarian Annie Sollinger joined the department as its first Visual Archivist. On March 2nd at 7:30 PM, Sollinger shared her experiences working with the collection of over 55,000 photographs.

The uniting principle of Paul Rheingold’s collecting practice was his interest in the physical format of the photographs: they are all mounted on board. Otherwise, they represent a broad range of formats and processes used between about 1860 and 1920. SCUA has retained the donor’s complex organizational scheme; the photographs are sorted into roughly 3,600 categories, organized into 22 series.

As unique as the Paul D. Rheingold Historic Photograph Collection may be, there are fascinating analogs to be found in the world of libraries and archives. Sollinger’s research into picture collections, with their own baroque taxonomies, will also tell a story about the history of photographic archives.

Annie Sollinger works at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center with the title Visual Archivist. She is also the library liaison to Art and the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, with a special interest in visual literacy. She has a Master’s degree in Information Studies and a Master’s in Art History, focusing on medieval manuscripts. She is also a practicing photographer and visual artist.

See http://scua.library.umass.edu/overview/photos/ to view images in the Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center at UMass Amherst. The digital repository for SCUA is Credo (https://credo.library.umass.edu/about). A digitization project is underway for the Rheingold collection, but thousands of other photographs can be perused online at the site.