Archival Science Commons^™

What’S Your Source?: The Dilemma Of Scanning Negatives Vs. Prints To Represent Images In Photography Collections, Kevin C. Miller

Pepperdine University Libraries

Recently, Pepperdine University Libraries initiated the digitization and curatorial arrangement of a large collection of negatives and prints donated by the widow of Hanson A. Williams, Jr., one of our alumni. Williams had been a photographer by trade and, after his death, his wife donated 13.86 linear feet of photographic images depicting his life at college and immediately afterwards in the Korean War. After processing the collection, we realized that we had a copious number of Williams’ original negatives in addition to multiple iterations (in some cases) of prints that he had made from these negatives. As we discussed a …