Historical Photograph Digitization Project

In 2001, the VC/UHV Library received a TexTreasures Grant, administered by TexShare. This grant covered the digitization of 3,500 negatives in the Victoria Regional History Center's Photograph Collection. The project was to scan photographs from our collection to represent a pictorial record of the arrival and assimilation of immigrants to the Victoria area. These immigrants came from across Europe: Ireland, Germany, Alsace, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Italy and numerous other countries. These new arrivals settled side by side with the original Mexican population to create a distinctive culture in south central Texas.

The 3,500 negatives were chosen from the Library's collection of over 10,000 negatives. Each negative was scanned and imported into Laserfiche, a document imaging/records management system, along with information about each photograph.

Users can view, download, and print photographs from the Laserfiche files on this website. The scanned photographs are arranged in broad subject categories (e.g., sports, buildings, events). These subject categories can be browsed and individual photographs selected. More specific information, such as personal names and places, can be found using the search function.

Instructions

Follow the steps below to begin searching the Historical Photograph Digitization Project:

Connect to the VRHC Digitized Photograph Collection.

To Browse:

[Note: With the Browse function you can choose photographs organized by the general subject matter of the photograph (i.e., agriculture, buildings, events, fire departments.)

• Click "Victoria Regional History Center."
• Click"Photograph collection."
• Choose a topic folder.
• Choose a photo name.
• Choose "Fields" from the options above the photograph to see all of the data related to the photograph.

To Search:

[Note: With the Search function, you can find photographs by dates, personal names, names of schools, buildings, and businesses, etc.]

• Select "Search" from the options at the top of the page.
• Select "Photograph Collection" in the template search box.
  • [Note: the basic word search option in Laserfiche is not completely activated and using it will not result in a true search of the collection!]
• Scroll down the list of fields until you find the field that best suits the information you are seeking.
• Type in your search. Your search criteria must be surrounded by asterisks (e.g., *smith*). For best search results, put search information in only one field at a time.
• Choose a photo.
• Choose "Fields" from the options above the photograph to see all of the data related to the photograph.

Tips for Effective Searching

• A template search looks through all the words in a chosen field for all the photos in the collection (not limited to only one folder or subfolder.)
• A template search will not search fields other than the one in which you entered the search term.
• Run multiple searches placing the same information in different fields. This applies specifically to the notes fields where a person's name may appear in Note1 or Note2 or Note3 or Note4 or Note5.
• Don't enter search words into more than one field at a time. This limits your search since it will only find items that meet all the criteria.

To Print:

Choose the "Get PDF Page" icon. You must have Adobe Acrobat Reader loaded on your machine to use pdf files. Always remember to use the printer icon on the Acrobat screen, not your browser's print icon.

ksl/03212003