NOAA@NSIDC’s Glacier Photograph Collection will benefit from CLIR Grant

The Glacier Photograph Collection, managed by NOAA@NSIDC, will get a big boost in 2016 from a Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) grant. The Glacier Photograph Collection includes over 15,000 digital images available online, as well as an analog collection of photographic prints of glaciers from around the world beginning in the mid-1850s. This grant begins a collaboration between NSIDC and the Digital Library at the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU). The grant will allow for a dedicated archivist and graduate assistants to digitize, describe, and publish the approximately 9,000 remaining photographic prints that have not yet been scanned, described, and entered into the searchable online catalog. The online portion of the collection now consists of both a relatively small collection of born-digital photos and a large number of digitized print photographs that pre-date the digital photographic era. Beginning in 2002, digitization of photographic prints began with a grant from the NOAA@NSIDC Climate Database Modernization Program (CDMP). However, when this program ended in 2011, NOAA@NSIDC was left with close to 9,000 photos that had not been digitized. The CLIR grant will provide support to finish digitizing these remaining prints that have been languishing in the NOAA@NSIDC archive for many years. Once digitized, these images will be added to the online Glacier Photograph Collection search interface and CU’s Digital Library for all to access. To access the digital photos already in this collection, see the Glacier Photograph Collection Search Interface. Data Set DOI: https://doi.org/10.7265/N5/NSIDC-GPC-2009-12