Words on Pictures

   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...

Romana Javitz in the Picture Collection. 1950s. The Annual Reports of the New York Public Library Picture Collection,  and published  from roughly 1916 to the late 1950s, offer a surprisingly rich body of evidence for study and analysis. They are not merely internal memos; read together, they form a longitudinal study of how visual culture, user communities, and the economics of pictures changed over half a century. Several kinds of analysis are possible. Note: See also recently digitized Unfilled Calls, 1925-1928 from internal Picture Collection records.  1. Growth, Scale, and Structural Limits The most obvious thread is quantitative: the rapid expansion of both stock and circulation, and the tension between demand and infrastructure. Stock growth • 1929: 222,828 classified pictures.   • 1934: 456,588 pictures (almost doubled in five years).   • 1936: 625,668 pictures.   • 1939: 877,405 pictures.   • 1943: 1,058,611 pictures.   • 194...