Words on Pictures

Rothman's Pawn Shop, 149 Eighth Avenue. 1938. Berenice Abbott. Changing New York  #297.026   Words on Pictures: Romana Javitz and the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection , is an anthology of writings by Romana Javitz(1903-1980) that also includes three interviews in which she expounds on the use of pictures, especially photographs, as a tool for documentation. When pictures enter the Picture Collection for circulation they are analyzed for their subject content first and foremost. Subsequently, Javitz and her highly trained staff assign a subject heading that most defines the visible content that dominates or best illustrates what is in the image. With this approach, photographs to be used in the Picture Collection are often washed clean of the photographers or the publisher’s intent. Under this rubric a photograph clipped from a magazine or newspaper can have just as much impact as a fine platinum print if its content clearly defines or illustrates a subject or subjects w

The Language of the Public "The thing is I decided that the classes of the John Cotton Dana classification just could not serve an artist public, or a general public...  so the thing is that I became convinced that an A-to-Z file would not serve  the public. That a simple alphabetic arrangement, such as Newark had, did not  group the material logically from its visual contents.  I decided then that the only thing to do would be to begin recording the language of the public in asking for the pictures, and that was begun as soon as I took over. Since there was no catalog of subject headings available, there was no catalog of subject headings at all by the way, since there was no catalog when the borrower came in he used his own language, and that language could be analyzed and those (became) headings.  At first it was used to show the trends and needs to guide the buying. Then it became obvious to me that unless we set up a subject heading scheme based on the lan guage used by the p