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Words on Pictures

A Professional Legacy

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   Romana Javitz’s career at the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection was not only about building a massive visual archive; it was equally about building a profession around that archive. She treated the Picture Collection as a laboratory for what a “picture library” could be, and then used that experience to help create a professional community—within the Special Libraries Association (SLA), in other libraries, and in graduate library education.    By the late 1940s and early 1950s, large numbers of special libraries—corporate, media, government, museum—were maintaining picture files and photographic archives. Most were subject-based and heavily used, but there were few shared standards for subject headings, storage, or research methods. In a 1965 interview, Javitz captured the situation bluntly: the field of picture libraries was “only three decades old… most picture collections have grown haphazardly and few even today are organized… the field is waiting f...
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The NYPL Picture Collection as a Midtown Nexus

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  Location, Location, Location: The NYPL Picture Collection as a Midtown Nexus The Picture Collection’s location at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue put it at the center of a mid‑20th‑century image machine. Within a short walk were nearly all the industries that produced, circulated, and monetized images: newspapers and magazines, publishers, fashion houses and garment manufacturers, film and theatre studios, radio and later television networks, advertising agencies, and department stores. That geography is not incidental. It explains why the Picture Collection became, in Romana Javitz’s phrase, a “giant encyclopedia where pictures are consulted instead of the printed word” and why it functioned as infrastructure for New York’s industrial image economy.   What follows sketches that geography and shows, with concrete examples, how firms and workers in Midtown used the Picture Collection and helped turn it into a major public visual resource.   1. Fifth Avenue and Times Squa...
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