Major consolidation of digital missionary photo archives.

Miller, Jon

At the University of Southern California, the Center for Religion and Civic Culture and the USC Libraries' Digital Archive have received a grant from the Getty Foundation to create a federation of two important repositories of historical missionary photographs. One of these, BMPix, is the collection held by the Basel Mission Archive in Switzerland, available at www. bmpix.org. The other is the "collection of collections," called the Internet Mission Photography Archive (IMPA), online at www.usc.edu/impa. Bringing these two repositories together under the permanent oversight of the USC Libraries will greatly enhance their long-term viability and their value as research assets for the scholarly community.

Missionaries from Europe and NorthAmerica were among the first to recognize the communications potential of the new medium of photography. Their pictures, some from as early as the 1850s, are among the earliest in existence that document social change in non-Western cultures. They represent an invaluable repository of visual information about a world that would otherwise be unknown--and that in many cases has now disappeared. While the pictures are obviously of interest to scholars charting the globalization of Western Christianity, they are by no means limited to the religious environment or the missionary agenda. Indeed, their scholarly value lies precisely in their ability to capture cultural encounters on a very broad scale and to provide a visual appreciation for the cultural, economic, political, and technological transformation of traditional societies.

Until recently, the usefulness of these collections has been limited by their dispersion across many sites. Few scholars are able to move from one archive to another in search of images to illustrate a theme, and comparative visual research across regions or time periods has been especially difficult. In the interest of making these materials more accessible, both BMPix and IMPAwere supported in their early stages by awards from the Getty Grants Program. As most mission researchers are aware, the Basel Mission Archive was a pioneer in making its important collection of missionary photographs accessible to researchers when it cataloged, digitized, and published over 27,000 pictures on the Internet. Inspired by the Basel example, the Internet Mission Photography Archive has consolidated several physically separate collections into a single repository. Some 14,000 images have been selected from collections held by the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America, the China Inland Mission, the English Presbyterian Mission, the Leipzig Mission, the London Missionary Society, the Moravian Church, the Norwegian Missionary Society, the United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia, and the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society.

Bringing BMPix and IMPA into a federated relationship will accomplish two important objectives. In the first place, while the BMPix Web site will retain its original Internet address at www.bmpix.org, it will be redesigned, technically updated, and hosted permanently by the USC Libraries. The Basel collection will have a secure home in an academic institution committed to its preservation and continuing availability to the scholarly community. At the same time, the BMPix images will be added to the IMPA database, and their accompanying descriptive information will be "mapped" into the cataloging format adopted by IMPA. In this way, IMPA will be dramatically strengthened by the addition of the Basel images to its database, bringing the total number of pictures in one Web site to over 40,000. IMPA is meant to be a growing resource, and when the federation with BMPix is complete, participation in IMPA should be even more attractive to archives that want to make their own collections available to the educational community.

When the project is finished (in 2008), there will be three pathways that lead users into the Basel Mission picture collection. First, when the refurbished BMPix.org Web site goes live at USC, it will continue to provide direct access into the collection in a format that, in terms of functions, is faithful to the original.

Second, the pictures in the Basel collection will be available through IMPA, using the search procedures and vocabularies developed for the collections that are already in the IMPA repository. An IMPA user's inquiry will yield appropriate Basel pictures when a general search is conducted across all of the collections or when a more limited search is directed specifically to the Basel collection by selecting "Basel Mission Archive" on the drop-down list of contributors.

Third, because the USC Digital Archive participates in the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), the identifying information and links for the pictures (but not the actual photographs themselves) for both IMPA and BMPix will be published and accessible for use by other participating digital archives. This pathway will lead users into the photo collections when the subjects of their searches touch on topics that are reflected in the historical photographs. This strategy for expanding searches (and audiences) breaks down the barriers between digital archives--text archives and visual collections, for example--that are administratively separate and that were originally conceived for different scholarly purposes.

As standards of international cataloging and digitization converge and as technical barriers and electronic storage costs decline, pictures add a distinct category of visual information to the more familiar text-based materials that are the usual primary sources for scholars. There is every reason to expect this information to be incorporated into historical scholarship as a matter of course. Equally important, as high-speed Internet access becomes more widespread, people in the areas in which the photographs were taken can for the first time participate in the discussion of what they mean, in effect internationalizing the conversation about social change.

--Jon Miller

Professor of Sociology

University of Southern California

Los Angeles, California