The LA Times has an interesting story about photos made available on the LA Public Library website. 70,000 photos are already online and more are put on each week as staffing permits. There are some by Ansel Adams and other photos of celebrities and local sights.
Although library officials say they don't track which photos are being viewed, what people are ordering says a lot about Los Angeles' appetite for its own history.
True-crime images, especially those involving the Black Dahlia murder, Robert F. Kennedy's assassination, the Hillside Strangler case and the Manson family, are "cyclically popular," said Matthew Mattson, photo imaging consultant for the library. "Every year, on the anniversaries, we get a lot of requests."
Other kinds of photos are perennially popular, Mattson said: The Hollywood sign, especially when it was "Hollywoodland." Shots of downtown, notably from the 1930s and '40s. Airplanes. Trains.
The library charges a nominal fee for printing images or distributing digital copies; commercial ventures are also charged a usage fee.
Although Cole encourages people to take the pictures from the website for personal use, she said the L.A. city attorney stands ready to defend the library when bloggers and others take the library's images for their own sites without permission.
But she also understands the intricate push and pull of the Web. Van der Leun, for example, did not draw legal action for placing the Adams photos online. His actions, said Cole, "called attention to our archives. And the conversation is a literate one."
Hmm, I wonder if I can put one of their photos here to point to their site...it's not clear from the article. They charge for almost every use -- even educational use costs $25. Also, although I'm sure the collection has some great stuff, to find things, there is no way to browse. The only point of entry to the collection I could find is the option to search by either keyword or by photographer. Since I don't know too many photographers from that time period, I'm in the dark there, beyond just searching for Ansel Adams.
Here's a photo direct from the site. It's the Tower Records on Sunset Strip, which like all other Tower Records stores, is in the process of closing down (if it's still there). Photo taken 1980 by Roy Hankey.
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