Photographic Archives

The Blaschka photographic collection contains a wide range of beautiful and interesting materials. These materials had not been accessed for some time, and so the archivists began with a number of large boxes overflowing with photographic prints, slides, negatives, and other materials. Original order was noted, but as the boxes had been rearranged so many times while waiting to be processed the order was not especially important. An inventory was taken of the materials in the boxes, and it was discovered that they contained a number of photographic prints, glass plate negatives, cyanotypes, glass stereo slides, 35mm slides and negatives, and other various photographic materials. All of these needed to be identified, cleaned, re-housed and arranged. Because there were so many material types, a simple approach to organizing them was to create large folders under the Latin name of each plant specimen, and to put all of the corresponding materials into each. The potential difficulty with this was in protecting the different materials from each another, such as housing a glass plate negative next to a glass stereo slide without damaging either. However, care was taken with each item and as the folders are being put together each piece is safely protected in its space.