Having been without electricity for the past 30 hours, I have a rekindled thankfulness for the electric light but also a stronger annoyance for the fact that my entire livelihood depends on electricity. No email, no access to Blackboard, it was a right splendid time knowing I had a deadline approaching, then passing, and being stuck in a county that probably won't see power fully restored until Saturday.
I do feel lucky that I'm back online sooner than I had anticipated.
This deviation aside and back to the topic at hand-- I was overwhelmed by what I found on the Print and Photograph Online catalog. I didn't necessarily find an overwhelming amount of images pertaining to the place I'd chosen, but the catalog in general is huge--rich in content and subjects, hard to search.
At first, I browsed the subjects, clicking on random letters, choosing a subject, and mindlessly glancing through the images it returned. I enjoyed navigating like this with no real objective. I found images that were old and intriguing. I wished to myself that I could continue browsing for hours and choose random photo for the assignment. Alas, I needed to get down to the searching because the power outage had put me behind far enough.
For this assignment, I stuck with the Pittsurgh theme, again searching for "Pittsburgh" initially and receiving 2161 results. Too many, so I returned to the subject that I'd been browsing. From the "P" list, I chose "Pennsylvania--Allegheny--Pittsburgh" which narrowed my results to 140, a manageable size. Frustration arose when I noticed that none of the entries were appearing with thumbnails that one can see from the results list. Choosing a random one since I had no idea what it was, I learned that it had several images attached to it--sketches and black and white photos. Anyone of these photos could have been utilized as a thumbnail image to make the search process a little more user friendly. My search would happen much faster if I could browse the thumbnail results without needing to open a record to see images. I played the game of opening records, then clicking through photos, then backing my way to the original results page countless times without finding anything that really struck me as perfect.
From here, I changed my thinking on Pittsburgh and decided to search for a specific place: Kennywood. I have lots of fond memories of Kennywood, so I searched. The Library of Congress provided me with three results, all black and white pictures of locations at "Kennywood Park, near Pittsburg, Pa." I was actually very grateful to see these images from "back in the day" when Pittsburgh lacked its "h" ending. I was pleased to see the casino, the lake and wonderland. It would be interesting to contrast those images with pictures from Kennywood today. It's not at all the same thing.
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