Extent:

28 volumes and 4 folders

Scope and content:

Photographs relating to the creation and construction of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, chiefly housed on album pages, with numbers assigned by the original creators. Some documents and ephemera are also present, as well as loose photographic prints housed separately from albums.

Other descriptive data:

Album numbers as they currently exist were assigned by the library. Current albums 1-26 were originally in the form of four massive and unwieldy ledger-style volumes with pages that had become very brittle. For preservation, in the 1980s or early 1990s, the volumes were disbound and rehoused by UC Berkeley Library’s Conservation Department. Each was re-bound as one of 127 small manageable “parts.” Because of overlapping and partially duplicative content among volumes, these re-bound fascicles were reorganized to bring duplicative and overlapping content runs together. The parts were then assigned numbers in one number run throughout the collection: parts 1-127. These parts were housed, usually in groups of five, in archival “phase boxes,” which were assigned volume numbers 1-26. Instead of being re-bound into parts, the contents of what is now Volume 27 were foldered. A few years later, three additional, mostly duplicative, volumes were disassembled, with unique photographs inserted at the correct numeric location to form a more complete item number run. Volume 28 is a volume that was retained in its entirety as an example of the original album format.

In the current arrangement, “parts” that duplicate each other have been housed and numbered so they are adjacent. Occasionally exact duplicate parts have been given the same part number with “copy 1” and “copy 2” added to differentiate. (These were, presumably, in different original volumes that contained overlapping content.) Captions of duplicate items can vary from part to part. The order of placement on pages can vary from part to part, even if contents are otherwise duplicates.

Library staff uniquely identified items on each album page by adding a letter (a, b, c, d, etc.), and in this guide that letter follows the page number for each item. Letters were assigned, when possible, in the following order: top left, top right, lower left, lower right. Photographs that were removed from the album page prior to being acquired by the library have been omitted from the count.

Most photographic prints in albums are captioned either with a typed label or in the negative (and therefore within the photographic print.) These captions have been transcribed in the finding aid. When no captions or insufficient captions are present, titles have been devised by library assistants and recorded within square brackets. Transcriptions are not precise in that obvious abbreviated words have been spelled out to aid in search and retrieval.

During the data entry process, if an identified photograph was missing from an album page (removed prior to acquisition by the library) but another copy of the view was located, either in the next “part”, or a previous “part,” then the item entry was made under the “part” in which the print was found. If a duplicate was not located, then the phrase “Missing item x is not available elsewhere in collection,” was added to the note field.

Occasionally a photograph has been added on an unnumbered tipped-in page with the matching typed label on a numbered page. In this case, the page number given for the photograph is the page number and location of the typed label. These were presumably inserted during the library’s re-housing and re-organization project.

Some loose photographic prints have been housed separately from the albums.

Contents

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