Comments on the Visual History Project

For me, the first challenge of this project was to think of an event that was on a national scale so that there would be images of it available on the National Archives’ or Library of Congress’s website. On these websites there are not as many images of the inauguration of John F. Kennedy as I thought there would be.

I had trouble understanding the copyright information for some of the images that I found on the Library of Congress’s Prints & Photographs Online Catalog. One of the images had a reproduction number but no information about publication and another one said that publication may be restricted. I followed multiple links, but I did not find any of them helpful. When I called the Library of Congress looking for some answers about specific images that I had found, I got a voice message directing me to the website. I was pleased to find that the image of Robert Frost that I found on the LOC website did have information about the copyright restrictions.

Even though the National Archives has fewer images concerning my topic, I thought its database was easier to use. The one image that I did find in its database had information about its use restriction. I liked that I could set the search parameters, that it displayed the images on the search results page, and that I could sort the images within the results.

This project was frustrating because the story that I wanted to tell was limited by images that I was able to find and could use. The most interesting part about this project was realizing that the images that I found shaped the story that I told and thinking about the impact this has on learning about history. Through this project I learned how images and informative captions can be used to tell a story.