The Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection, initially published in late 2003 by the Indiana University Libraries in partnership with the Indiana University Archives, is one of our most visited digital special collections, with nearly nine million hits to date. Charles Cushman, amateur photographer and Indiana University alumnus, is regarded for his early adoption of Kodachrome color slides and his depiction of every day life, between 1938-1968, in the United States and abroad. An Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) National Leadership Grant in 2000 funded the digitization and online publication of Cushman’s unknown yet spectacular photographs that amounted to nearly 14,500 35mm slides available on the web site.
Once released to the public, Cushman captivated the masses and impacted scholarship, in unanticipated ways. Professor Eric Sandweiss, Carmony Chair of Indiana University Bloomington’s History Department, published articles and, more recently, a book analyzing Cushman’s photographs, The Day in Its Color, and heavily used the online collection to further his research. The collection was also used in creative ways. It inspired individuals to blog personal histories, write fictional stories around photographic themes, and modern day photographers to replicate and juxtapose current day images of buildings and sites with those depicted in Cushman’s original photographs. The worldwide press coverage was unanticipated and has included a home page feature on the Daily Mail and a story on ABC News, both published as recently as September 2011, NPR's Picture Show in 2012, and more.
Recently, we were contacted by Jon Voss from HistoryPin who had heard of our Cushman Collection and was keen on integrating all or parts of the collection into HistoryPin. Developed by the Non-For-Profit, We Are What We Do, in partnership with Google, HistoryPin is a community-driven, collaborative digital history project that exposes our global cultural heritage, with an emphasis on place and space, via a platform that's conducive to mapping (or "pinning"), storytelling, and crowdsourcing our collective history.
As indicated above, the Cushman photos are a mesmerizing slice of life that has already captured the interests of so many people. The Cushman collection is an ideal contribution to HistoryPin, and we are, in turn, eager to share the Cushman Collection more broadly and benefit from the collective knowledge of HistoryPin users.
To this end, though others interested in the Cushman metadata are welcome to it, we include in this repository a CSV file of 15,190 rows of metadata, 14,425 records of which are currently published in the Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection. The collection is richly described with every record containing geographic location information, at a minimum, at the city level. The following controlled vocabularies were used:
- Getty Thesauraus of Geographic Names (TGN): Neighborhood, City, State, Country
- Library of Congress Thesauri for Graphic Materials, Subject Terms (TGM I): Topical Subject
- Library of Congress Thesauri for Graphic Materials, Genre and Physical Characteristic Terms (TGM II): Genre
- Library of Congress Authorities Files (LCAF): Personal names, places (not in TGN), subjects (not in TGM I)
Cushman metadata is also available via OAI-PMH, which provides additional information like which controlled vocabularies or encodings were used:
- MODS/XML: http://oai.dlib.indiana.edu/phpoai/oai2.php?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=mods&set=cushman
The metadata for the Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection is published by the Indiana University Libraries is available free of restrictions. If you use the metadata for this project, we ask that you cite your use as follows:
- Metadata from the Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection was created under the direction of the Indiana University Archives and published by the Indiana University Libraries.