Martin Reilly, on the reading-room.
Retired reference librarian in Astoria, on an archive-reading side-project that grew out of volunteer work with the County Historical Society.
My background
I am a retired reference librarian. I worked at the Astoria Public Library from 1981 to 2017 — thirty-six years at the same reference desk, in a small Carnegie library on Tenth Street with a view of the Columbia. I retired in 2017 and have, since then, volunteered three afternoons a week at the Clatsop County Historical Society, which has its main offices and reading-room in the old Flavel House two blocks from the library.
Why this project
The Clatsop County Historical Society has, in its photographic holding, approximately eighty thousand catalogued images of the northern Oregon coast — Astoria, Warrenton, Hammond, Gearhart, Seaside, Cannon Coast, Arch Cape, Cove Beach. A substantial portion of the holding is in the public domain, either because the photographer is unknown and the image is more than ninety-five years old, or because the photographer has explicitly placed the image into the public domain. The holding is, in effect, an unread public resource. The reading-room is a small private effort to begin reading some of it.
What this is
Five short essays per reading, each on a single public-domain photograph from the holding. The essays follow the art-historical reading-room tradition — date, attribution, context, what the image records, what it leaves out, what its place in the wider archive is. They are written for readers who like to look at photographs slowly.
What this is not
It is not a sales site for prints. The Society does sell prints of selected images, on its own website, with the proceeds going to the Society's preservation work; that is the right place for that transaction, not here. The reading-room itself is a writing project — it carries no commerce, links to no shop, and has no sponsored content.
On the public domain
All five photographs in the inaugural reading are in the United States public domain, either by age (the 1906 Brück & Sohn lithographs are unambiguously out of copyright) or by explicit dedication (the more recent Wikimedia Commons uploads carry public-domain or Creative Commons dedications by their photographers). The site's image-credit page lists every photograph, with the source URL and the licence terms.
On the Society
The Clatsop County Historical Society is a small non-profit run from the Flavel House at 441 Eighth Street, Astoria. It does the patient work that the small county historical societies all do — cataloguing, conservation, the occasional exhibit, the membership newsletter. The reading-room is my private writing project, not a Society publication; the Society has reviewed it informally and has been kind about it.
The Clatsop County holding is, in effect, an unread public resource. The reading-room is a small private effort to begin reading some of it.
— M. R., Astoria, Oregon