The Indiana University Digital Library Program has unveiled a groundbreaking digital collection of 14,500 color images of everyday life in the middle of the 20th century.

Taken by amateur photographer Charles Weever Cushman between 1938 and 1969, the images document an amazing cross-section of American and international subjects, from inner-city storefronts and industrial landscapes to candid portraits and botanical studies. The collection is part of the Indiana University Archives.

The richly saturated Kodachrome slides add color to an era primarily recorded in black and white—"a world that we had long since resigned ourselves to viewing only in shades of gray," writes Eric Sandweiss, IU’s Carmony Associate Professor of History, in an essay included on the collection's Web site. "In Cushman’s work," he observes, "the past becomes, for an instant, impossibly present."  

Deteriorating colors in some of the slides, however,  led IU’s image specialists to consult with experts at the University of Basel in Switzerland, who have researched fading patterns of film dyes. Technicians there recreated mathematically what the dyes on the slide might have looked like at the time of processing and used this information to generate color-corrected versions of about 250 of Cushman’s images in both film and digital formats.

Viewers may search the collection or browse the images by year, location, subject, and genre, a task possible only because Cushman, who graduated from Indiana University in 1917, meticulously recorded notes about the thousands of images he shot over more than three decades.  

"We would never have undertaken this project without Mr. Cushman’s detailed recordkeeping," says Kristine Brancolini, director of the Digital Library Program.  "We used his notebooks, which have been digitized and linked to the photographs, to create a rich descriptive database and sophisticated searching."

In 1972 Charles Cushman bequeathed to the university the notebooks, some of his photographic equipment, and his entire collection of photographs, neatly packed and labeled in suitcases. The slides were rediscovered by a university archivist in late 1999.

Brancolini says she hopes the collection will reach a national audience of social historians, scholars of vernacular photography, historic preservationists, and the general public.

"While one takes pleasure in examining these handsome images singly," Sandweiss concludes in his essay, "the greatest reward comes from assembling them as a group and discovering in their totality a clearer picture of a place that we
thought we knew: the United States, c. 1938-1969, a place close enough to touch, but forever just out of reach."

To view the collection, go to: www.dlib.indiana.edu/collections/cushman. The project was funded in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the primary source of federal funds for the nation’s museums and libraries.  

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The Digital Library Program also released a new version of Letopis' Zhurnal' nykh Statei (1956-1975), an index of Russian periodicals, searchable in Cyrillic, which provides access to periodical literature, beginning with the period of the Khrushchev "Thaw" and continuing through the first half of the so-called Brezhnev "Period of Stagnation."    

Only about 15 to 20 universities in the United States have back issues or current subscriptions to the series, and most of these holdings are incomplete.  Digitizing the index, which is a serial publication that lacks a cumulative index itself, increases access to information published during the Cold War.

And that's a boon to researchers, at IU and all over the world, who have limited access to a valuable resource whose pages can deteriorate with every turn.  The index, which is the Russian language equivalent of Readers' Guide, Humanities Index, and Social Sciences Index combined, was printed on highly acidic paper that has become extremely brittle.  

To search the index or learn more about the project, go to: www.dlib.indiana.edu/reference/letopis.  The project was funded in part by the U.S. Department of Education, through the Title VI program Technological Innovation and Cooperation for Foreign Information Access (TICFIA).

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Established in 1998, IU's Digital Library Program is a university-wide partnership of the IU Libraries, University Information Technology Services, the School of Library and Information Science, and the School of Informatics.  The Digital Library Program is dedicated to the selection, production, and maintenance of a wide range of high-quality networked resources for scholars and students at Indiana University and elsewhere.

The Indiana University Archives, a part of the IUB Libraries, is the largest and most comprehensive source of information on the history and development of Indiana University. Its collections include photographs and manuscripts of the university’s officers, faculty, students, and alumni.