The Analog Collection

Prior to 2018, NSIDC housed thousands of glacier photographs as prints and on microfiche. The largest single collection of print images, comprised of roughly 5000 prints, is the American Geophysical Union/American Geographical Society (AGU/AGS) Collection. This collection originated with William Osgood Field in the late 1950's. Field was the head of the Department of Exploration and Field Research at the AGS from 1947 until he retired in 1969. Field took many of the photographs and assembled them for an AGU research committee. On the strength of this collection, in 1957, the International Geophysical Year (IGY) committee awarded the WDC for Glaciology in the United States to Field and named him as the first director. He maintained the collection until the WDC for Glaciology was moved to the United States Geological Survey (USGS) in Tacoma, WA in 1970 and then to what became the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, CO in 1976.

The photographs in the AGU/AGS Collection are primarily of Alaskan glaciers but also include the Pacific Northwest (U.S. and Canada), the Rocky Mountains, and Europe. Field indexed the photos by region and drainage system. For example, he indexed Alaskan glacier photos starting in the southeast corner of the state, continuing north and west, following each drainage basin in a counterclockwise direction. This method enables photos of neighboring glaciers to be filed next to each other. This filing system is used for Field's collection and some subsequent early donations are filed into this system as well. Other donations are arranged into sub-series by photographer name. It is from the AGU/AGS Collection that the first photographs were selected for the CDMP digitization project.

The AGU/AGS Collection that Field donated to NSIDC/WDC for Glaciology also included the Harry F. Reid collection. Reid, America’s first geophysicist (Gillispie 1975, Louderback 1945), traveled to Glacier Bay, Alaska, in 1890 and 1892 in order to photograph and map the area. Collected by Field after Reid’s death in 1945, the materials include approximately 600 glass plate negatives and prints, 22 expedition notebooks, and approximately one cubic foot of manuscript materials that include drafts of Reid’s map of Glacier Bay. Also included are photographs taken during Reid’s trips to the Alps from 1894 through 1901. Users should note that some of the photographs taken by Reid were of the local area and not of an actual glacier. The Reid photographs without glaciers were given a glacier name of No Glacier in the database.

Austin Post was a research scientist for the United States Geological Survey (USGS), known for his aerial photographs of glaciers in Alaska and the U.S. northwest. Copies of the Austin Post aerial photograph collection became a part of the WDC for Glaciology collection when the WDC was transferred to the USGS in Tacoma in 1970. This collection of photographs, the Post-Mayo-Krimmel (PMK) Collection, comprises approximately 100,000 photographs, almost all of which are only available on microfilm. However, over 6,500 Post photos are part of the digital GPC.

The Greenland photograph collection was donated to the WDC for Glaciology, Boulder, in the mid 1980s by Captain Ron Kollmeyer of the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG). Captain Kollmeyer was the lead for the Greenland Glacier Survey. More than 1,200 color slides have been digitized and are available via the online Search & Order interface. The photographs of western Greenland glaciers were taken between 1969 and 1980 from ground observation stations and from USCG helicopters at an altitude of between 100 and 1,000 feet.

Until becoming inactive in the mid 2000s, the WDC for Glaciology, Boulder, was an entity that had an interest in maintaining the analog archive of glacier photographic prints that are the bedrock of the original digital GPC. NSIDC and the WDC for Glaciology, Boulder, were collocated; and NSIDC, with monetary support from NASA and NOAA, provided a home for the analog archive. However, NASA support was lost in 2012; and NOAA@NSIDC support was insufficient to maintain the analog archive. In 2014, we could no longer maintain a full-time archivist. With preservation and longevity in mind, NSIDC instigated a move of the analog archive from NSIDC to the CU Boulder Libraries Special Collections, Preservation, and Archives department in August of 2018. The collection is now called the Roger G. Barry Glaciology Collection. With materials under the care of CU Boulder Libraries the collection will continue to receive preservation care and future access to the materials will be made available through the CU Boulder Libraries.

Analog to Digital

NOAA CDMP Grant - 2000 to 2011

The NOAA Climate Database Modernization Program (CDMP) ran for 12 years from 2000 to 2011. In partnership with the NOAA National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC) (now the National Centers for Environmental Information) and SourceHOV, a CDMP corporate partner, NSIDC digitized selected analog photographs for online distribution. The goals of the CDMP Glacier Photograph Digitization Project were the following:

• Make the photographs better known among the glaciological community and others
• Increase availability of the images
• Provide the highest-quality digital reproductions of the photographs available
• Provide proper archival storage for the digitized subset of glacier photographs

NSIDC selected images for digitizing that were held by NSIDC with no copyright restrictions, that were of good quality, and that show substantial portions of glaciers. The original black-and-white photographic prints range in size from 2 x 3 inches to 8.5 x 11 inches. Figure 4 shows a picture of some of the analog archive holdings.

The following requirements were provided to the CDMP contractor for digitizing the photographs:

• The reproductions should be an uncompressed archival image (TIFF), a compressed reference image (JPEG), and a thumbnail image (JPEG).
• The archival image should be the highest-quality image possible (TIFF) with version 6.0 headers, uncompressed, unedited, at 600 dpi. Use 24-bit RGB color, 1800 to 6600 pixels across the long dimension, depending on the size of the original print. This resolution should be the actual optical resolution of the capture and not achieved by interpolation.
• The compressed reference images should be saved in the JPEG format and will be 640 pixels on the long side of the image. This resolution should be the actual optical resolution of the capture and not achieved by interpolation. JPEG File Information Format (JFIF) headers will be used.
• The thumbnail images should have a size of 150 pixels on the long side of the image in the JPEG compressed format. JFIF format/headers will be used.
• The tonal range of the reproduced images should be representative of the original scene. General imaging industry standards, as well as standards established during the initial startup and testing phase, will be followed. There will be no clipping.
• The reference and thumbnail images should be reduced in scale and sharpened and compressed, but the methods used to accomplish this shall not degrade the image. All derivative images shall maintain the general look and character of the archival images.
• The software used to produce the digitized images shall meet requirements pertaining to spatial resolution, tonal distribution, and noise. Spatial resolution shall be determined by measuring the modulation transfer function of the capture system. The required resolution shall not be sampled up from a lower resolution.
• Scanners and monitors should be calibrated at the start of the project and scanners should be re-calibrated with a change in media size twice each day: at the beginning of each day of digitizing and halfway through the digitizing. If more than one scanner is used, each lot must be kept separate, so that quality control can take into account the calibration that was done for each batch. Set monitor to 24 millions of colors, set gamma to 2.2 (1.8 for Macintosh), set color temperature to 6500 degrees, and calibrate to Standard Red-Green-Blue (sRGB).

Through funding from the NOAA CDMP program, approximately 14,000 prints were scanned, assigned metadata, and added to the digital GPC.

CU CLIR Grant - 2016 to 2018

In 2016, the Council of Information Resources (CLIR) awarded a data rescue grant to NSIDC, in partnership with University of Colorado (CU) Boulder Libraries, to digitize and collect metadata transcription of roughly 9,000 photographs. This partnership provides that all digital surrogates (scanned images) in the GPC database will also be searchable in CU Boulder Libraries Digital Library platform as the NSIDC Glacier Photograph Collection. Discovery of the collection in the CU Digital Library will open the collection to new audiences from different disciplines. In addition, the metadata fields added to meet the extended requirements of both NSIDC and CU Boulder library database systems present further opportunities for new users to engage with the material. Added fields include spatial coverage terms, object format terms, and latitude/longitude of photographer photo stations. At the end of the CLIR grant, approximately 8,800 photographs were cataloged and digitized.

Under the purview of the CLIR grant project archivist, photographic prints were preserved and stored for archival quality limiting the future amount of deterioration (Maness et al. 2017). The project archivist identified new subsets of the collection such as Edward and Asahel Curtis, William O. Field, Arthur Elliot Harrison, and the International Boundary Commission. The photographs in these subsets were reorganized by date and negative/photographic print number. This organizational format gives better input to the scientific expeditions and daily routines of the scientists. This method also allows for better connections between photographs taken from the same location subsequent years later by the same photographer. The remainder of the photograph collection that was not divided into a subset maintains the original index system of photos by region and drainage system (as described above).

With preservation and longevity in mind, NSIDC instigated a move of the analog archive from NSDIC to the CU Boulder Libraries Special Collections, Preservation, and Archives department in August of 2018. With materials under the care of CU Boulder Libraries the collection will continue to receive preservation care and future access to the materials will be made available through various CU collaborations.

The Digital Collection and its Metadata

When the digital GPC collection was first created in 2002, the metadata for the digitized images were compiled at NSIDC in an Excel spreadsheet that was uploaded to a Postgres database. The metadata for the initial release of about 1,000 glaciers in 2002 was derived primarily from the Glacier Photograph Collection Index, a project started in the late 1970s by NSIDC staff. The metadata covers many aspects of photographed glaciers or of the photograph itself. These may include the altitude at which a photograph was taken, date, photograph number, geographic coordinates, and mountain range and drainage system to which the glacier belongs. As the collection has progressed, new metadata fields have been added to further describe the digitized images as deemed necessary. Not all of the metadata descriptor fields were included in the metadata for all the digitized images. Table 2 shows all metadata fields, with a column to indicate those which are required for inclusion in the database and those which are optional.

The original keywords used for the Glacier Photograph Collection Index project were Terminus, Medial moraine, Terminal moraine, Lateral moraine, Firn line, All of glacier, Rock glacier, and Other. These were assigned to each indexed photograph to show if it included features that might interest a glaciologist. For example, if the glacier terminus could be seen in a photograph, those compiling the index in the 1970s would tick keyword Terminal Moraine in the Index entry for that photo. Transcribing the Index information and using it as metadata for photographs was the original intent of those at NSIDC who worked on the digital GPC.  However, this was too labor intensive to be sustained, so NSIDC assigned Index keyword terms by simply looking at the scanned photographs. Glaciers in the first release of about 1,000 photographs have Index keywords assigned. During the CLIR grant period, an additional 1,400 photographs had keywords assigned and the number of keyword terms was increased from the original eight Index terms to nearly 60 (See Table 2). All other images have no keywords assigned.

NSIDC used the USGS GNIS to look up geographic coordinates of most glaciers. For those glaciers that did not appear in the GNIS or when more than one entry for the same title appeared, NSIDC determined approximate coordinates by either referring to the original photos (for hand-written information from the photographer), or by doing web-based research, including Topozone or Terraserver, to estimate coordinates near the middle of the glacier.

In some glaciers for which the Index or the GNIS did not supply geographic coordinates, the Alaska Atlas & Gazetteer (2001) or Hormes et al. (2001) provided coordinates.

In 2015, in order to facilitate the addition of more photos from crowd sourced photographic web sites like Flickr Creative Commons and Wikimedia Commons, the requirements for digital photos were loosened, thus some high-resolution photos are suitable for digital applications but are not suitable for print.

Special Collections

As the digital GPC has progressed over the years, a need to identify special collections within the main collection arose based on type of images, the region, or the entity that compiled them. It began with the Repeat Photography of Glaciers collection in 2006 with six other special collections added as of 2016. Table 4, History of the Glacier Photograph Collection, has information on when these collections were added. The collections are the following:

• Repeat Photography of Glaciers
• National Park Service Glacier Survey Reports
• DAHLI IGY Glacier Photographs
• NASA Astronaut Glacier Photographs
• Antarctica Dry Valleys Glacier Photographs
• WGMS Glacier Photographs
• Lake Clark National Park and Preserve Collection

Repeat Photography of Glaciers

As Harrison wrote in 1960, "The glacier story is always changing, but it can be caught and preserved with the proper use of a camera" (pp 1). Repeat photography is the practice of taking multiple photographs of the same subject, from the same location, at different times. Glacier photographs taken from the same vantage point but years apart in time often show changes in the glacier terminus position that may be indicative of climate forcing. Tidewater glaciers may exhibit shorter term cycles of terminus advance and retreat as well. These repeat photographs are of special interest to glaciologists.

This special collection displays photographs of the same glacier, taken from the same vantage point, at the same time of year, but taken many years apart. These photographs can show evidence of glacier and climate changes over time. Repeat photography can reveal dramatic changes in the glacier terminus position, as a glacier either advances or retreats. Most glaciers around the world have retreated at unprecedented rates over the last century. These pairs of photographs can provide striking visual evidence of climate change.

To take repeat photographs of glaciers, this means finding the site of a previous photograph, reoccupying the original camera station while using best methods to recreate the original camera position in order to make a repeat photograph of the same scene. Scientists may revisit their own stations to recreate their photograph, or they may attempt to recreate photographs taken by others.

While there were few programs that established a systematic monitoring program of glaciers, many in the field shared their resources and built upon each other’s work. Often times, the scientists were returning to another scientist’s photo station to make observations. For example, from 1931 to 1982, William Osgood Field revisited photo stations mapped by Harry F. Reid and the International Boundary Commission (IBC) of 1893-1907. In turn, current USGS glaciologist Bruce Molnia returned to these same photo stations to document changes from 1990 to the present day.

In March 2006, Molnia collected and contributed repeat glacier photographs to this special collection. He had taken many of the later ones himself and had digitized the earlier ones from other data collections. These are identified in the Source metadata field as U.S. Geological Survey (distinguished from USGS Photo Library, which refers to USGS historic collections). Notes and Keyword metadata fields are based on information from Molnia. In June of 2006, Matt Nolan donated repeat photographs to this collection; and Lonnie G. Thompson contributed repeat photographs in July of 2007.

Photographic stations are an important aspect of the photo monitoring process in repeat photography. These stations are named, mapped, and returned to in various years. Relocation of camera stations help indicate changes that have taken place while contributing to the body of scientific work. In the GPC collection photographers/scientists William Osgood Field, A.E. Harrison, and Charles C. Morrison Jr. have the most descriptive notes about photo stations they mapped and utilized. Field based his photo stations from the IBC and would often list the IBC’s photo station name in connection to his own. By grouping photographs taken from a specific photo station, a better indication of the landscape can be observed. Photo station information is transcribed from the photograph and recorded in the Notes field of the metadata.

Figure 5 shows an example of the glacier pairs found in this special collection of photographs. To access this subset, see the Search & Order interface; the Choose a Collection drop-down list will already have Repeat Glacier Photographs selected.

National Park Service Glacier Survey Reports

RMNP began conducting glacier surveys at the request of geologist, Francois E. Matthes, in 1932. The NPS donated copies of the glacier survey reports to Matthes for the International Committee on Glaciers (now called the International Association of Cryospheric Sciences). For a history of the committee from 1894 to 1994 and its subsequent transformations, see the The International Commission on Snow and Ice (ICSI) and its Precursors, 1894-1994 PDF document (Radok 1997). Matthes later donated his collection to NSIDC/WDC for Glaciology. NSIDC holds reports from the years 1932-1952; these reports include 265 glacier photographs. Several of the reports combine more than one year into one report, and not all of the reports contain photographs. The 265 images in the reports were digitized and added as the National Park Service Glacier Photographs special collection in January 2008. To view the photographs in context, see the associated PDF file listed below:

• Topographic Map, RMNP, 1937, Area of Study (TIFF, 82 MB)
• Glacier Survey, RMNP, 1934, Dorr C. Yeager (PDF, 513 KB)
• Glacier Survey, RMNP, 1937, H.R. Gregg (PDF, 1.8 MB)
• Glacier Survey, RMNP, 1938, H.R. Gregg (PDF, 2.2 MB)
• Glacier Survey, RMNP, 1939, H.R. Gregg (PDF, 1.7 MB)
• Glacier Survey, RMNP, 1940, H.R. Gregg (PDF, 2 MB)
• Glacier Survey, RMNP, 1941, H.R. Gregg (PDF, 1.1 MB)
• Glacier Survey, RMNP, 1942, H.R. Gregg (PDF, 1.8 MB)
• Glacier Survey, RMNP, 1944, Russell Grater (PDF, 296 KB)
• Glacier Survey, RMNP, 1946, H.R. Gregg (PDF, 1.9 MB)
• RMNP, 1949 Glacier Report, Edwin C. Alberts (PDF, 287 KB)
• RMNP, 1950 Glacier Report, R.G. Bindelman (PDF, 1.8 MB)
• Glacier Measurement Report for 1951, RMNP, Edwin C. Alberts (PDF, 15.9 MB)
• Glacier Measurement Report for 1952, RMNP, Naturalist Office (PDF, 14.5 MB)

Note: Metadata in the Notes field were taken from the captions associated with the photographs in the reports.

To obtain high-resolution versions of these 265 photographs from the park reports, see the Search & Order interface; the Choose a Collection drop-down list will already have National Park Service Glacier Photographs selected.

To cite the photographs from the reports, see the section on Citing these Data. To cite the digital reports (PDF files) use the following format:

Author’s last name, first name. Year published. Title. Boulder, Colorado USA: National Snow and Ice Data Center. URL to the PDF report at NSIDC.

For example:

Gregg, H. R. 1939. Glacier Survey, Rocky Mountain National Park. Boulder, Colorado USA: National Snow and Ice Data Center.

DAHLI IGY 1957-58 Glacier Photographs

This special collection is from Alaskan glacier surveys led by William O. Field during IGY, 1957-1958 that was a follow on to the first two International Polar Years (IPY) 1882-1883 and 1932-1933. Glaciology was one of the primary research areas studied during IGY. Discovery and Access of Historic Literature from the IPYs (DAHLI) program (now called the International Polar Year Historical Data and Literature collection) sought to locate, identify, preserve, catalog, and digitize data, literature, photographs and other materials from the first three IPY events: 1882-1883, 1932-1933, and 1957-1958 (IGY).

These photos, taken between 1957 and 1959, represent an attempt to systematically study glacier change in Alaska. These 2154 images comprise the DAHLI IGY Glacier Photograph collection and were added to the broader Glacier Photograph Collection in March 2008. To access this collection, see the Search & Order interface; the Choose a Collection drop-down list will already have DAHLI IGY Glacier Photographs selected.

NASA Astronaut Glacier Photographs

Added in June 2010, this special collection of 500 photographs was taken by NASA astronauts on the International Space Station and the Space Shuttle Endeavor. These photos were taken between 1994 and early 2010. The photos were collected in collaboration with the NASA Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth project. The goal was to make these photos more widely available and discoverable. To see the photos, go to the Search & Order Interface; the Choose a Collection drop-down list will already have NASA Astronaut Glacier Photographs selected.

Antarctica Dry Valleys Glacier Photographs

This special collection of 24 photos, added in March 2011, consists of field photographs from the McMurdo Dry Valleys region of Antarctica. While the valleys themselves are notably ice-free, a number of glaciers terminate in the valleys, some acting as outlets to the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. Studies show that the majority of the glaciers in this area are receding. Glaciers were photographed in the course of geologic studies and help document the conditions of the glaciers and how they may have changed. These photos were originally made available through a pilot project of the Data Conservancy at Johns Hopkins University (JHU). Prior to December 2014, the high-resolution digital images were archived at JHU. After that, the collection of 24 images was moved to the archive at NSIDC when the pilot instance of the Data Conservancy was decommissioned. To see the photos, go to the Search & Order Interface; the Choose a Collection drop-down list will already have Antarctica Dry Valleys Glacier Photographs selected.

WGMS Glacier Photographs

The World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) compiles and disseminates standardized observations on glacier fluctuations such as length, area, volume, and mass. This special collection of 1192 photos, added in May 2015, focuses on photographs of glaciers for which long fluctuation series are available, some of them dating back to the 19th century. The photos were assembled from the WGMS archive, from contributions from WGMS principal investigators, and from various other sources that provide freely available data. The main sources include the WGMS Fluctuations of Glaciers (FoG) database, the archive of Bavarian Glaciers, the Glaciers Online collection prepared by Jürg Alean and Michael Hambrey, photos from the Interactive Repeat Photo Comparisons of Various Swiss Glaciers project conducted by Simon Oberli, the Swiss Glacier Monitoring Network, and work shared by researchers and students associated with the WGMS. Additionally, photographers who freely share their work on platforms such as Flickr Creative Commons and Wikimedia Commons contributed significantly to this collection.

Most photographs in this collection were born digital. In some instances, photographer names are Wikimedia or Flickr usernames under which the photographers published their work. Image size and resolution vary widely; while some images may be of print quality, others offer resolutions limited to digital applications. The collection was assembled by WGMS/NSIDC graduate interns Rebecca Navarro, Julien Bodart, and Mylène Jacquemart in late 2014 and early 2015. For more details on the development of this special collection, see the WGMS Internship Report: Growing the Glacier Photograph Collection (Jacquemart 2015). To see the photos, go to the Search & Order Interface; the Choose a Collection drop-down list will already have WGMS Glacier Photographs selected.

Lake Clark National Park and Preserve Collection

This collection of 1173 photographs of glaciers in and around the Lake Clark National Park and Preserve in Alaska was compiled by Jacob Zanon while he was a Natural Resource Specialist Intern in the GeoSpatial Services Department at Saint Mary's University, MN. The collection, added in 2016, is comprised of many images of glaciers inside the park and preserve taken from both the air and the ground from 1987 through 1990 and in 2004 and 2007. J. Zanon collected all of the digital images and created the metadata for them. Once the images and metadata were transferred to NSIDC, they were reviewed for quality and accuracy by Ladina Glaus while she was interning at NSIDC as a graduate student in the Geography Department at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. She checked that all photographs, which show the same glacier, have the same coordinates. Google Earth was very helpful for this analysis. Because most of the photos did not provide a glacier name, she attempted to determine them. To this end, she uploaded a Microsoft Excel file with the Digital File IDs and the corresponding coordinates as a shape file into QGIS and then merged it, by location, with the corresponding outlines from the GLIMS database. Additionally, she consulted maps and a satellite image atlas of Alaska by Williams and Ferrigno (2008). She was able to determine some glacier names, however, most glaciers in Alaska are unnamed. To see the photos, go to the Search & Order Interface; the Choose a Collection drop-down list will already have Lake Clark National Park Glacier Photographs selected.