Page 6. MAINE COASTAL NEWS June 2016 P M M P 5,000 P NF
SEARSPORT – Museums are defi ned by their collections and the Penobscot Marine Museum of Searsport has become well- known for their photographic collection. This began back when they acquired a large collection of the Eastern Illustration Company of Belfast, which specialized in photo-postcards. This has been followed by other large photographic collections, which has earned the Museum a fi ne and growing reputation. Four years ago another large collection came to the Museum, this one from Diversifi ed Communications of Portland and consisted of about 15-17,000 photographs from the commercial fi shing publication National Fisherman. Matt Wheeler has been involved with
this collection since it arrived at the Mu- seum. He added, “Ben Fuller, the curator here, had been courting Diversifi ed Commu- nications for a while trying to entice them into donating their print archives here. He had had some conversations with them and fi nally in 2012 they agreed that it should come here. Kevin Johnson [who heads the photo archives collection] and I went down and picked up four fi le cabinets from their warehouse and brought them back up here. “We got countless folders containing mostly photographic prints that were sub-
mitted to Diversifi ed for “National Fisher- man” starting back in the 1950s before the magazine was technically the National Fish- erman right up through the 1990s when they switch to all digital submissions,” continued Matt. “Most of the prints are eight by tens, but there is a variety of other formats and mixed in with the prints there is a fair num- ber of slides, negatives, copies of technical drawings, advertising, brochures and other materials. We are most of the way through digitizing the prints at this point.” Scanning the photographs into a com-
puter is not a major aspect of this project. What takes the time is accumulating all the information there is about a certain photo- graph. Matt said, “I would say half of them have good information, but some have none at all. Others all we have is a citation, as to which issue it appeared in, and that is help- ful because we have a lot of the back issues here. It would be very worthwhile if we fi nd more funding to help the catalogers go back through and comb out all the information there is out there.” Recently the Museum put up 5,000
images on their website from this collection for the public to view. Matt continued, “The images are watermarked. If someone wants a copy to print in a publication we provide
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people with an un-watermarked, higher resolution copy for a nominal cost. We want these photographs to be out in the open, we wanted them to be seen and we want people to know that they are here.” The subject matter is varied. “You see
everything from product photography to countless vessel photos,” said Matt. “There are Coast Guard vessels, big factory trawl- ers, and small lobster and fi shing vessels. There are a lot of photos of people: people who fi shed, people who were regulators and people who work in packing facilities. This collection is pretty broad spectrum.” The Museum also has a collection of
photographs from the publication Atlantic Fisherman, which began in the early 1920s. This was one of the publications that was purchased and combined with Maine Coast Fisherman and Pacifi c Fisherman to create National Fisherman in the mid-1950s. The Museum plans to create a major ex-
hibit of the National Fisherman photographs in 2017. Matt added “Our summer exhibit next year is going to be all about fi sheries with a big focus on National Fishermen. We will be showing a number of images on campus. We have talked about ideas for some other more specifi c exhibitions of the National Fishermen photographs. For example there are some great portraiture among the photographs. We would like to
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do a portrait exhibit at some point from the magazine. We are also presenting at the CAMM conference in 2017.” When will the rest of the images be done
and up online, Matt said that they have more than 12,000 images scanned and more than 11,000 cataloged. Ben Fuller is going back through the images. Matt said, “He is going back through the catalog records and adding information. He has been able to add a lot of information and to clean a lot of things up.” Another collection they are working on
is the Coffi n Collection, which contains a lot of material on sailing vessel, especially from the mid-coast area. “We have had a very knowledgeable volunteer from the Blue Hill Peninsula cataloging that,” said Matt. “We fi nally started to digitize it. We just got a collection of photographs from a fi sherman who was also a photographer. He took a lot of interesting photographs of the fi shing fam- ilies in Penobscot Bay going back into the 1970s and up into the 1990s. There is some great stuff there. Another collection with a variety of formats came in, which focuses on the mid-coast area. A good chunk of it is maritime but not all of it.” “It is fantastic that people know that the
Penobscot Marine Museum is digitizing its collections and putting them online for open
Continued on Page 8.
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