A Professional Legacy
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...