Women's Studies Section

Association of College & Research Libraries / American Library Association

Description

Historic photographs from the collections of the Denver Public Library Western History and Genealogy Department and the Colorado Historical Society. The database contains some 100,000 images, as well as records for photographs in the collection that have not yet been digitized and made available online. Photographs are of American Indians, pioneers, railroads, mining, Denver and Colorado towns, city, farm, and ranch life, recreation, scenery, news events and other subjects and states. In addition to the Denver Public Library photographs, there are about 1,000 images of artifacts from the Colorado Historical Society and the Denver Art Museum.

Women's Studies Content

A broad keyword or subject search for "women" generates thousands of results. Images are of American Indian women, pioneer women, and early 20th century women's domestic work and recreational lives, women in educational settings, women and children, portraits of women, and more. The photos are of a high quality and one can stumble across some very beautiful and interesting everyday women. There is a gallery devoted to Native American Women.

Searching

One can keyword search or browse search by subject or title. Author/name searching is also possible. Records have detailed summaries of the images. Women's studies related subject headings appear to be limited to the heading women combined with date and geographic headings. This is useful if one wants to retrieve photos of women from a particular time and place -- for instance, women in Colorado from 1890-1910. Most geographic references are from Colorado, but Arizona, New Mexico, California, and other western states are represented.

Archive Review:
Sherri Barnes
University of California, Santa Barbara