iSchool Capstone

Snapshots of Seattle’s Past: The Elmer Ogawa Photograph Collection

Project tags:

archives & special collections

content & digital asset management

knowledge organization

Project poster

The Elmer Ogawa Photograph collection is a large and mostly untouched collection of photographs by Elmer Ogawa, a Japanese-American photographer and native Seattleite. Many of Ogawa’s photographs document local Seattle history and social scenes during the mid-twentieth century. The collection has been inventoried but has not been fully appraised and only partly digitized. The project team focused on making the Elmer Ogawa Photograph collection manageable for future development and continued digitization. Through weeding extraneous photographs, assessing the collection for content, and adjusting the finding aid to reflect alterations, the team was able to refine and cultivate the collection. Completion of this project has allowed the University of Washington Special Collections Library to reallocate resources and storage space to other projects while making the Elmer Ogawa Photograph collection easier to maintain, digitize and showcase to the public.

Project participants:

Kate Emery

MLIS

Kim Pittman

MLIS