Worth Beyond Words: Romana Javitz and NYPL Picture Collection

New York Public Library's Picture Collection, 1940s. Photo by Wurts Bros.
New York Public Library Archives (Visual Materials, RG10). 

Worth Beyond Words: Romana Javitz and NYPL Picture Collection. 

The general public, especially outside the New York City area, is not familiar with the uniqueness of the New York Public Library's Picture Collection. It provides, much like books, the free circulation of prints, photographs, postcards and other clippings, all arranged using subject classification. And they have been doing it since 1914! 

The story of the origination of the Picture Collection and the career of Romana Javitz (1903-1980) can be found in an essay I wrote in 1995 for the NYPL journal Biblion: Worth Beyond Words: Romana Javitz and The New York Public Library's Picture Collection

Here is an excerpt:

"Within two years of the opening of The New York Public Library's Central Building in 1911, the Print Room found itself overwhelmed with requests for prints strictly from a subject point of view. Most of these requests came from artists and illustrators in the employ of New York City's burgeoning graphic arts industries and cultural enterprises, which included movie studios, Broadway and vaudeville theatres, advertising agencies, publishing companies, and fashion houses, all competing for new ideas and pressuring their artists and illustrators to deliver them. The Print Room, a repository for fine art prints, did have a wealth of the sort of material that was sought, but its holdings constituted a rare and fragile collection that could not withstand heavy use. Moreover, these holdings were cataloged by artist only, not by subject. Print Room staff therefore directed artists and illustrators to the Art Division to consult the clipping files there, or to the Children's Room in the Circulation Division, where illustrations could be found in children's books and encyclopedias.

The situation at the Library, and the increasing use of pictures as a means of communication and enrichment in modern culture, resulted from the explosive growth of the printing arts at the turn of the century. The industrial impetus created by the sudden and simultaneous late nineteenth-century advancements in photography and photolithography set the stage for the coming modern age in the visual and graphic arts. Improvements in printing presses allowed for more color illustrations, and halftone screens brought better photographic reproduction. Innovations in camera and film design, particularly George Eastman's Kodak camera and the dry plate negative, contributed to the growth of a large amateur photography movement. Soon, the American public was bombarded with graphically oriented media. This created a huge demand for illustrations and eye-catching layouts in advertising, magazines, newspapers, and movie and theatre posters, as well as for textile, architectural, and industrial designs.

In these circumstances, the Library's solution of sending people to the Children's Room, where the content was inadequate, or to the Art Division, where the materials could not leave the room, was not enough. In 1914, the Circulation Department began saving plates, posters, postcards, and photographs for the new sort of "reader." The Library's annual report for 1915 announced: ". . . a picture collection for lending was desirable. Requests have come from schools, city history clubs, moving picture actors, and advertisers. . .  Borrowers include not only people who have been card holders in the Branches, but an increasing number whose first interest in the Library was aroused by the picture collection."(1)

By the end of that year, 17,991 pictures had been prepared for circulation. Many of these pictures came from old magazines and books that might otherwise have been sold for scrap paper. Donations began to pour in. As word spread about the availability of the pictures, the Library assigned Ellen Perkins, a chief cataloger in the Circulation Department, to oversee the program's development. In 1926, with the growing collection now housed in Room 67 of the central building, Ms. Perkins was given the position of Head of the Picture Collection, and the Picture Collection was formally established.

In this modest way began a collection that is today, at five million items, a major resource for visual ideas. Over the years, the Picture Collection staff built and organized so diverse and comprehensive a collection that libraries, corporations, and governments from around the world have studied its structure and consulted its librarians in order to apply its lessons to their own picture libraries. Historically, the development of the collection illustrates the way in which effective approaches to service and cataloging for visual materials evolved, and how the cataloging of pictures came to diverge from the traditional bibliographical orientation of descriptive cataloging, emphasizing instead the maximum number of access points to a picture's subject content."

(1) NYPL Staff News, Sept. 17, 1915. pp. 127-128.  

Get the full Worth Beyond Words article here: https://www.nypl.org/about/divisions/wallach-division/picture-collection/romana-javitz

 Words on Pictures: Romana and the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection. edited by Anthony T. Troncale. New York: Photo | Verso Publications, LLC, 2020.   ISBN 978-1-7346409-0-8 (hardcover)  Identifiers ISBN  978-1-7346409-1-5 (ebook)

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