Lifted verbatim from Mike Del Vecchio, Tri-State NRHS via Facebook:

This large group of glass plate negatives needs some much needed TLC. Many were deteriorating 20 years ago and Syracuse did not treat them with the proper care this treasure deserved and they wouldn't allow others to volunteer to help either. A lot of excuses why you couldn't get any access to the archive. Unfortunately 20 years of additional poor storage has not helped the condition of these treasures but finally, with this move history can be preserved.
A big thanks for those who have made this happen.

Rich Jahn
Anthracite Railroads Historical Society, Inc.

Let's hope history does not repeat itself at Steamtown.

Pat Mcknight, Steamtown's head archivist, is well regarded and is known to get things done and arrange cooperative work agreements. Very much the opposite of the Syracuse culture.

In what way will these photo collections see great use? Certainly they do not intend to just make prints off of the original glass plates at the request of users, do they?

Odds are the collection will be printed from the negatives, which can then go into secure curatorial storage. The prints will then probably be digitized and made available much like the LOC prints have--Then Shorpy will borrow them for his website.

In any instance, the images will be receiving greater circulation and longevity than they would have at Syracuse, where they probably didn't fit the collection of the archive and hence were ignored.

I suspect Lackawanna fans will be looking forward to future information about this project. Kudos to Steamtown for taking on this effort.

Michael Seitz
Missoula MT

Any idea how far back it goes?

These days, it's just as easy--and possibly safer to the negatives themselves, depending on the system used--to simply scan the negatives and digitize/print the results. Why go through the traditional (but environmentally insensitive) process of silver printing, save for the sake of "tradition"?

ANY storage medium--paper, celluloid film, magnetic media, photocopies, digital--is only as good as the care, effort, etc. used in the original production and the care in storage and cataloging (the latter so it can be found and identified later).

I am not sure if there would be any advantage in making copy negatives. But when I mentioned making prints, I was referring to using the original glass plates to make photographic prints for sale to interested parties. I certainly hope they do not plan to do that. They probably don’t, but the information is not clear on that point. There are historic newspaper collections that allow researchers to paw through the original papers, and then run prints off of them.

The first plan of action should be to copy the glass plates by some process for the purpose of preserving the images. Then the glass plates should be put into permanent safe storage as the masters.

Yes, scanning would be the best approach for archival preservation. The only issue with scanning is that a lot of people are inclined to scan at a resolution that they can rationalize as being high enough, when a higher resolution would be better. There are two purposes for historic images:

1) Aesthetic
2) Informational

In book printing, for example, these two objectives are often in conflict with each other. Printers who are not historians only see the aesthetic objective, so they are inclined to increase the contrast. They want to see an image that “pops.” It does not make any difference to them whether it is an historic locomotive or a landscape scene in the Rocky Mountains. They want contrast and saturation. So in the process, they gain aesthetics and lose information. They lose details.

So, when it comes to archiving historic images, it is quite possible that the people doing the work will have this same image popping mindset. They will take it upon themselves to “improve” the historic images. They will see the fine grain tonal values of the glass plate images as being “flat,” even though they show every nut and bolt. Copy technicians often want to insert themselves into the creative process behind the image.

Furthermore, the popular propensity to scan at low resolution lends itself to the image-popping objective. Preserving the tonal gradation and resolving fine details requires higher resolution.

So, while the first objective with this historic collection should be to archive the images by digital copy, there is considerable peril in how it is handled.

As far as I know, traditional silver halide photo paper is still the most archival print medium in existence..especially B&W silver prints, with no color dyes.

I would suggest two methods of making images from the original negatives:

1. Contact print them onto silver B&W film, then those negs can be used to make "high quality" silver B&W prints, that steamtown could sell as fundraisers. (or just preserve as backup images)

2. also digitally scan them, for two reasons..to have digital scans of the negs, which can then printed onto other less expensive print media, ink jet, thermal, etc, and sold cheaper than silver prints, if that is desirable ..and the digital scans could also be used for whatever digital purposes steamtown might wish..webpage, etc..

doing it those two ways gives you "the best of both worlds"..and having duplicate copy methods helps ensure the survival of the original images if anything should happen to the original glass negs, or if they deteriorate further over time..

Scot

Unless I'm mistaken, the negatives at Syracuse are mostly from the DL&W's ICC valuation study of the early 19-teens. A company photographer had use of a special train, and his mission was to photograph everything. He shot in all four directions at every public crossing, for instance, and photographed every station, water tank, tool house, crossing guard shanty, bridge, etc.

Nearly thirty years ago, when I was working for a shortline that operated former DL&W trackage, I was lent a number of prints of scenes along the particular branch over which our line operated, which I used to produce several calendars which were distributed to customers and friends of the railroad. Some of the photos were contact prints, others were postcard-size copies. Every single one was sharp as a tack and filled with great detail. They were numbered, and once I figured out the sequence, I could identify nearly every location. These negatives will be a great boon to those interested in the DL&W, especially in the pre-World War I era.

Mr Mitchell is correct - a high quality scan direct from the negative will yield the highest quality image. I have scanned thousands of large format negatives and the difference is amazing! A copy negative loses a lot of detail and is "old school". Any silver print also cannot capture the detail contained in the negative. Wet darkroom prints are getting expensive and difficult to have made as it is all low volume custom work. The direct scan can also be easily retouched to correct for exposure or defects caused by the deteriorating emulsion.
I suspect the original plates will be handled as little as possible so there won't be any prints made directly from them that will be offered for sale. The plates should not go out of house once they are there and cataloged. Digital files can be sent anywhere. All publications today convert everything to digital before it hits the printing press.
There are archive standards for scanning items like this, which the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania and the Smithsonian follow and I suspect this will be similar. Yes, you never scan at high contrast. Generally, the raw scan may not look that great but can be easily adjusted later in a program like Photoshop.

Rich

Wow. I am especially interested to see if they reveal anything on Scranton's Luna Park. There was a foot bridge that crossed over the DLW trackage, which I am hoping may have been photographed. L&WV documentation is mentioned as well.

I agree that the collection should be scanned. However, I have had photo prints, negs, and original artwork scanned, and have found that every scanning service will do the scanning differently, yielding different results. I have found that scanning results are likely to be unsatisfactory.

So when you commit a huge collection of images to scanning, what specification parameters do you give to the people doing the scanning? Scanning is a subjective process based on personal judgement unless the intent is rigidly defined. I would sure hate to get 1000 images scanned and find out I did not like the results.

This is why archivists get paid. (Or should.) Among other things, they are expected to keep up with the "state of the art" in technology and communications.

Fifteen years ago, I was lucky enough to borrow some "irreplacable" photos and get them scanned by a Civil War archivist who was using the "best" flatbed scanner she could get at the time--300 or 600 dpi (and such an improvement over those hand-held scanners we started with!). We saved each photo as a TIFF; they filled one floppy apiece. Fat lotta good those floppies do me now.

Now, I have possession of the prints in question--quite lousy Kodak Brownie prints, all told. No 12,000-dpi scanner will help the fact that these were cheaply shot and processed by an amateur photographer in the 1890s, with grain, dust, lens flare, etc. But Photoshop will salvage many of these (after better scanning) to potential usability.

Twelve years ago I had to go all the way down to the Library of Congress in D.C., and after running their security gauntlets, download TIFF versions of photos I needed for publication to Iomega Zip discs to send off to the publisher. Now I can download the full-resolution TIFFs directly at home/in the office.

What Steamtown needs to ask themselves--aside from scanning to save the images before they deteriorate further, is the mission to make money from selling these images, or to promote awareness and interest in their mission by displaying and publicizing these images and getting people fascinated by them? Archives management, properly done, strikes the best compromise between preservation, dissemination, and protecting the interests of the archive.