Image: Justin Webb and Uncle Sam © Ander McIntyre

A portrait of Justin Webb, presenter of the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, just before delivering the third annual Benjamin Franklin House Robert H. Smith lecture in American Democracy ('Wise Up America! A Friendly Word from a Foreigner'), co-sponsored by the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library on 10 May 2013.

James Montgomery Flagg's famous First World War recruiting poster image of Uncle Sam is from the current Propaganda: Power and Persuasion exhibition at the Library, which runs until 17 September.

[Ander McIntyre is a photographer and a Fellow at the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library.  He is an occasional contributor to this blog.]

Noam Chomsky at the British Library, 2013 © Ander McIntyre

Ander McIntyre is a photographer and a Fellow at the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library.  He is an occasional contributor to this blog:

A portrait of Noam Chomsky just before he delivered a lecture at the British Library on 19 March this year, as part of the series of events under the banner of the Library's new exhibition Propaganda: Power and Persuasion.

In 1988, Professor Chomsky wrote, in Language and Problems of Knowledge: The Managua Lectures (MIT Press),

Work of true aesthetic value follows canons and principles that are only in part subject to human choice; in part, they reflect our fundamental nature. The result is that we can experience deep emotion - pleasure, pain, excitement, and so on - from certain creative work, though how and why remains largely unknown. But the very capacities of mind that open these possibilities to us exclude other possibilities forever. The limits of artistic creativity should, again, be a matter of joy, not sorrow, because they follow from the fact that there is a rich domain of aesthetic experience to which we have access.

A film of Chomsky's conversation at the Library with Jonathan Freedland is on our YouTube channel.

[A.M.]

Above: 'View of Locks' in 'Hunter's Ottawa Scenery' [Shelfmark: RB.31.c.502]

These works are free of known copyright restrictions.

After ducks took over the blog earlier in the week a change of tone - although our feathered / mechanical friend will be pleased water is still involved. I've been digging through a few of the Library's printed books on 19th-century Canadian scenery and I thought I'd share some of the examples of subtle and striking change I've come across. The above illustration is a view of the Rideau Canal locks that sit below the parliament buildings in Ottawa, taken from 'Hunter's Ottawa Scenery' [Ottawa City, 1855. Shelfmark: RB.31.c.502]. It shows the city around the time of its incorporation but prior to its installation as capital of the Province of Canada.

Above: 'Rideau Canal Locks and the Parliament Buildings', by the Canadian Photographic Company [Shelfmark: HS85/10, Copy. 22830]

The above photograph was copyrighted in 1910 by the Canadian Photographic Company, less than 60 years after the plate in Hunter's 'Scenery' was produced. It illustrates quite nicely the changes brought to the area and its development as a national capital, although the scale of change is not as dramatic as in other examples from the collection. A good example here is an illustration of Toronto taken from Willis', 'Canadian Scenery' (London, 1842. Shelfmark: 789.e.18).

Above: 'Fish Market, Toronto' in, 'Canadian Scenery' [Shelfmark: 789.e.18]

According to the Toronto Public Library the area shown is at the foot of today's Jarvis St., downtown Toronto. By 1903 the view looking across this area was strikingly different, as the below photograph by William Thompson Freeland shows. The photograph is taken across the road from Toronto's government buildings, looking across Younge St. and Jarvis St. out towards the lake and the islands. While it doesn't show the area from 'Canadian Scenery' directly it does illustrate the dramatic change Toronto has undergone.

Above: 'Toronto Panorama, pt 4' by William Thompson Freeland [Shelfmark: HS85/10, Copy. 14481]

These are just a few examples from the collection depicting the changing Canadian environment and relevant items are not just found in printed books and photographs. For example, the topographical views and maps that make up the King's Topographical collection also contain myriad views which help illuminate the developing landscape of Canada.

For more on the scale and scope of the Library's Canadian collections, visit our Help for researchers pages.

[PJH]

Miniature panorama of Parliament Hill, Ottawa [copyright number 22264, shelfmark: HS85/10]

This work is free of known copyright restrictions.

So, the day is here when Andrew and I get to show the first fruit of the Picturing Canada project to the world. Friday sees us present the initial outputs from the project to attendees of the GLAM-WIKI 2013 conference and it only seemed right to share it with our Americas blog readers too.

Digitisation is almost complete, with just the largest images still to come (a nice treat to end the project with), and while a few things need putting in place before we can host the images on the Library's Digitised Manuscripts page they are being gradually uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. Here the collection has a dedicated area which will soon have an introductory blurb and you can browse the collection as it grows over coming weeks.

That said, what have we got to show you? I briefly described the history and content of the collection a few weeks ago on the Americas blog but here are some fun extra facts. First off, we have so far mapped the collection's contents to over 300 different locations in Canada and you can browse this on the map above. This time it's a vector map so you can zoom in and out, clicking on the buttons for details on the location, how many photographs there are from each area and what time period they cover. I'm afraid there's no direct link to the photographs yet, as we're still uploading, but it will be available in the coming months.

 

I've also got back to thinking about how the collection reflects the history of Canada. It provides a dynamic (and sometimes irreverent) lens on the many significant events that occurred between 1895 and 1924, both inside and outside of Canada. The above is one of the slides from Friday's presentation and it gives a highly selective and somewhat hap-hazard view of Canada's history during the period - but hopefully it provides a sense of some of the significant and / or interesting events of the period.

Over the course of the project Andrew and I have worked hard to make the metadata attached to these photographs usefully available as well as refining it and putting it to new uses. Hopefully the result of this will be a collection of photographs of use to historians of Canada, historians of photography, the writers of myriad Wikipedia articles and - you never know - the creator of the next cat-based meme.

I can live in hope... That said, if you put the photographs to any interesting uses please let us know.

[PJH & AG]

An early visualisation of the collection contents (click for more detail)

The works contained in this post are free of known copyright restrictions.

Those of you who enjoyed Team Americas' cat-themed post a few weeks ago will know that we are currently working to digitise a collection of Canadian photographs held at the Library. Since the digitisation is almost done Andrew and I are beginning to think about ways of displaying the collection and allowing access to the images, beyond hosting them on the British Library Digitised Manuscripts site and Wikimedia Commons.

Since I spent all my university life in geography departments one possibility popped straight into my mind - we could try and map the collection. The picture above is an illustration of the first attempt at this and hopefully I can soon share an interactive version with you. Why a picture at this stage? Well, truth be told, the first results contain a few bugs and I didn't want to give the wrong impression with an early version.

Sir Wilfrid Laurier speaking in Montreal, 27th Sept 1916. British Library shelfmark: HS85/10

That said this first try suggests that mapping would work as a way of opening access and providing users with an easy overview of the collection. It also begins to give a sense of the pattern and density of photographic deposits (important given this is a copyright collection), although this is skewed by the fact that the current map will only add one item to each location.

A pageant from the celebration of Quebec's Tercentenary, 1908. British Library shelfmark: HS85/10

There are a number of ways we could begin to use this as a tool to ask questions of the collection but it is important to note too that such a visualisation will be a good way for people to find the photographs that are of personal interest to them. In short, a map is by far the easiest way to see how many photos of Vancouver, Moose Jaw or Dawson the collection holds.

The above photographs are some examples of photographs that users will eventually be able to find via the map. I should note that the location data in any first version will be generic, pinning photographs to 'Vancouver, BC' as oppose to, 'Stanley Park Drive, Vancouver, BC'. It occurs to me that this level of refinement is something users could help to provide in the future, but one step at a time for now.

The next stage of the project, as Andrew mentioned a few weeks ago, is to tidy up the photographs we have already digitised and we are hosting an editing day on the 18th March. If the above map whets your appetite and you want to come along details can be found here.

[PJH]

As the Picturing Canada digitisation project reaches critical mass the Library's Wikipedian in Residence needs your help - and has photos of Canada's cats to share.

In 1895, an amendment to Canadian law allowed the British Museum to receive one copy of all Canadian intellectual property deposted for copyright registration. This situation persisted until 1924, when - as part of a general reworking of Canadian copyright law - the right of receipt was removed.

During these thirty years, the Department of Agriculture - who administered copyright - regularly parcelled up half their deposits and sent them to London. As well as books, maps and sheet music, the collection included a copy of every photograph copyrighted in Canada in this period. These are now held by the British Library and, despite some of the works being lost in their original transit (thanks to the sinking of the Empress of Ireland) or added to other collections (such as the Geraldine Moodie photographs held by the British Museum), they represent a significant collection of early twentieth-century Canadian photography.

The interesting - and unusual - aspect of this collection is that it's entirely unselective. Anyone who submitted two copies of their picture, the correct form, and the right amount of money would have it copyrighted; it would be entered into the collections without any regard for its artistic merits. As a result, the collection includes some entirely unexpected material:

 

We don't yet know anything about the "Globe Kittens" (1902), but it seems a reasonable bet that not many serious photographic curators would have bought and preserved prints of them! As well as what you might expect - portraits, buildings, scenic pictures of mountains - there are hundreds more images like this - unexpected, provoking, and quite possibly completely forgotten. So far, working through the catalogue data and the early scans, we've found cute animals, urban-regeneration proposals, salacious stereograms, and at least two attempts to copyright a movie.

The British Library recently got funding from Wikimedia UK and from the Eccles Centre for American Studies to digitise the bulk of the collection. We're planning to have them released to the public by mid-April, but we've hit a snag. While the digitisation itself has proceeded well, and we have a veritable mountain of metadata to work with, we still need to do the final step of cropping and orienting the pictures - this part can't easily be automated, and my fingers are getting pretty tired.

So, we're going to run a workshop at the British Library on Monday 18th March to try and steamroller through the backlog of image processing, and we're looking for volunteers to help. We'll provide laptops (though you can of course bring your own) and lunch; you'll have a chance to get a sneak preview of this collection before it goes public, as well as helping us look for interesting or significant images that we haven't discovered so far.

If you're interested in coming along and joining our experiment in "physical crowdsourcing", please get in touch!

[AG]

[Ed: Some of our regular readers will recognise this collection as the one Phil has mentioned here, here and here. For those of you who would like to know (quite a lot) more about the collection and its contents Phil's thesis on it is available here.]

'The Palace Bears' by Jennie Walsh (1916). Held at Shelfmark: HS 85/10, copyright deposit number 32282.

This work, identified by British Library, is free of known copyright restrictions.

The weather's not be very festive in the UK so here are some wintry highlights from the Colonial Copyright Collection to interest and amuse you. While there is no real reason for selecting these photos I've always had a soft spot for some of them, including the rather natty 'sleigh motorcycle'.

'Ice Cave, Illecillewaet Glacier' by Bryon Harmon (1908). Held at Shelfmark: HS 85/10, copyright deposit number 19328.

'Rotary Snow Plow' by Byron Harmon (1910). Held at Shelfmark: HS 85/10, copyright deposit number 22138. 

'A Sleigh Motorcycle' by John G. Dickson (1914). Held at Shelfmark: HS 85/10, copyright deposit number 28387.

These works, identified by British Library, are free of known copyright restrictions.

This might be the last Team Americas post of 2012, so have a very merry Christmas and a great start to 2013.

[Team Americas]

 

Joker, patriotic fund collector

This work (Joker, waiting for the call, shelfmark HS85/10, by creator: D. Will McKay, producer: British Library), identified by British Library, is free of known copyright restrictions.

A milestone to celebrate with you all today. After much selection, work-flow organisation, scanning, quality checking and metadata addition, a selection of photographs of Canadian troops departing for war in Europe is now available via the Library’s Digitised Manuscripts catalogue. The photographs are a small part of the Library’s contribution to the Europeana Collections 1914-1918 project and will be co-hosted on the British Library and Europeana sites.

The Canadian WWI photographs are part of a collection we’ve written about here before; it contains the work of Canadian photographers who copyrighted their work between 1895 and 1924. As a result, the collection contains a number of photographs relating to the war, although almost all of them are produced on Canadian soil. These have been digitised for the Europeana project and just over 150 pictures of regimental mascots, soldiers leaving for Europe, Canadian war work and military inspections are available to search and view in detail.

26th Batt. departing

This work (Scene at embarkation of 26th Battalion and ammunition column, by creator: D. Smith Reid, producer: British Library), identified by British Library, is free of known copyright restrictions.

The bulk of the pictures are battalion panoramas and the scale of these always drives home to me the horror of the war – rows and rows of individuals marching off to a mechanised war which consumed the lives of so many. With that in mind, making these items available online is perhaps a good way to mark the centenary of the war; a forceful reminder of the individual and social cost of the conflict.

If you would like to browse the whole collection of photographs the best way to do this (at the moment) is to use the search function on the homepage of Digitised Manuscripts. Simply add ‘Canada’ as a keyword and reduce the date range to ‘1875 – 2000’, this should bring up just over 150 results. There are a few teething problems to sort out and we’re working on them right now, but if you find any you have my apologies.

[PJH]