Transferring the past to the future

Saturday, Jan. 29, 2000 | 9:38 a.m.

As museums and libraries across the country work diligently to transfer their exhibits and photos onto compact discs, the Nevada State Archives office is on its way to making its photograph collection publicly accessible.

About 4,000 photos -- including portraits of Nevada state officials and first ladies, mug shots of infamous prisoners and pictures of community events -- have been scanned into a computer, then saved on CDs. This will eventually make accessing the photos much easier.

Once complete, the two-CD set will contain about 5,000 photos and will be available in libraries and on the archives' website. The CDs should be finished by spring.

The project was possible through a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, an independent grant-making agency. The CD project will serve as a model for other divisions within the state department that plan to someday take on the same project.

"Everybody's waiting to see how this works out," Jeff Kintop, state archives manager, said. "If it goes well there will be a lot of effort in that direction."

Because the Archives Commission began cataloging and indexing its photos in 1991, it had a head start on the project. Before this the photos were organized into small collections in file folders.

"It will make things a lot more convenient for our users and for us," Kintop said. When a photo is requested, the person making the request can wait one to two weeks to receive it in the mail, he said. Once researchers have the CD available to them, they can print out copies immediately.

Most requests to the state archives come from newspapers, journals, publications, magazines, film makers, documentary makers and scholars. Most of its photographs are of state officials, such as governors, legislators and Supreme Court justices.

Because Nevada was the first state to use a gas chamber as a form of capital punishment, McFarland & Co. Inc., which is creating an encyclopedia of capital punishment, recently requested a photo of Gee Jon, who was the first person to be executed in the chamber.

Selecting the best photo for someone calling with a request can be very time-consuming, Kintop said. The department may have hundreds of photos of a certain person or topic. It's a matter of which one the requester wants.

With the CD, however, the name or topic can be typed into a search engine, then a group of thumbnail sketches are brought up. Some photos are already available on the archives' website.

Not only will the CD make accessing photos much easier, it will help protect photos that are handled, dropped, bent, spindled and faded by light each time they are taken out, Kintop said. "It saves a lot of wear and tear on the collection."

Photographs of events, such as Nevada parades, also will be available. For example, for the state's centennial in 1964, every community had its own celebration, and they were recorded in photos, Kintop said.

Photographs of inaugurations, speeches and legislative sessions will also be on the CD.

The thought of trudging through black and white portraits of state officials may not sound exciting to the average person, but the collection has more to offer. It includes an extensive collection of some of the more colorful characters, such as Julia Bulette, the madame of Virginia City who was a popular figure in the 1860s, or Floyd Loveless, the youngest person to be executed in Nevada -- on Sept. 29, 1944, at age 17. Bulette was murdered in 1867. Because she was so popular, her murder created a stir. The man accused of murdering her was hanged.

Also contained are early photographs of the Lehmans caves, the Mormon Fort, a number of bridges and an archeological dig at Lost City. The curious can also see what the homes that were covered by the creation of Lake Mead in 1936 looked like before the lake existed.

One of the oldest and one of the more unique photos is an 1876 Carlton Watkins photograph of the state Capitol right after the fence had been built around it.

Photographs, such as shots of the interiors of state buildings as well as photos of Northern Nevada cities and towns, might also draw interest. "Nevada's growing so quickly. Even things that are 20 years old are popular," he said.

Then there are the many photographs taken by the highway department in the 1940s and '50s. "There's a lot of open space and lonesome photos," Kintop said.

It all can be accessed on the CD. Five-thousand photographs may seem like a lot, but compared with similar projects in the country, it is a relatively small endeavor.

"We wanted to start out with a small project to show the feasibility of making old photos available," Kintop said. "We should be able to come up with recommendations for scanning and create kind of a how-to manual."

While the commission is working from a grant, the other, smaller museums say it will be some time before they have the funds to take on a similar project.

"It's a very costly matter," said Eileen Maxwell, spokeswoman for the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The sheer magnitude of these projects make it extremely time consuming, she added.

Each photo has to be scanned in, which is a lot of work for an entity that may have literally tens of thousands of photos, Maxwell added.

But once a project is complete, the CD frees individuals to do more thorough searches, Maxwell said. "You can have a more thorough picture of history."

Peter Bandurraga, director of the Nevada Historical Society, which also has nearly a half-million photographs in its collection, said it will be at least a couple of years before the Historical Society takes on a project like this. "The technology is easy. But it's expensive."

Like the archives commission, the Historical Society has been scanning images and storing them electronically on a database until it is ready to have them recorded onto a CD. But through another project, a number of the images are being used for a CD being created for the Clark County School District.

"It gives teachers a real visual resource," Bandurraga said. "Photography contains a lot of information."

Photos taken in the 1860s and 1870s of towns that lasted only as long as the gold and silver are part of the collection, such as Treasure City near White Plaines. The town lasted only three years in the 1860s.

After the gold and silver ran out, the miners would leave, as well as the newspapers and photographers, Bandurraga said. Sometimes they'd even move the buildings.

The collection also includes photos of the Hoover Dam being built. One of Nevada's earliest photos, an 1862 photograph of fireman marching on C Street, shows the town of Virginia City being built.

The Nevada State Museum and Historical Society holds thousands of photos showing early life in Southern Nevada. The collection includes photos from the birth of the town in 1905 to present day.

Two of its main collections were donated by families of local photographers. One collection includes photos of downtown and The Strip from the 1940s on. Another collection holds thousands of negatives of aerial shots showing the growth of the valley.