>> Pete Richey: Welcome to the Prints and Photographs Division's virtual reading room orientation on deaf history. My name's Pete Richey. I'm a digital library specialist here in the Prints and Photographs Division. I'm joined by my colleagues Ellen Kays, a library technician here, and Sara Duke, one of our curators. We're pleased to have you with us today. April is Deaf History Month and we'll be sharing some photographs with images from our collections here in Prints and Photographs with an emphasis on the history of the deaf in America. We'll also be sharing some search strategies you can use on your own to search our collections. For those of you who are not familiar with the Prints and Photographs Division, we're the primary access point for finding visual resources here at the Library of Congress. There are more than 16 million images in our collections. These include photographs, historical prints, posters, cartoons -- -- documentary drawings, fine print, and architectural and engineering designs. The collections are particularly strong in materials documenting the history of the United States and the experiences and interest of Americans. We do want to note that there are visual resources in many of the other Library of Congress divisions, such as the American Folklife Center, the Manuscripts Division, and Rare Books, and Special Collections. That means you may want to contact some of those other divisions to find out what sorts of resources they may have. Here on the left side of this, you'll see a picture of the Library of Congress here on the Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. The Library has three buildings here. On the left, you'll see the Jefferson Building. That's the one with the dome. Behind that is the Adams Building. It's very hard to see in this picture. On the right is the Madison Building. That's the one with the red arrow pointing to it. The Prints and Photographs Division is in the Madison Building. The Prints and Photographs Reading Room is the picture on the right. The Reading Room is currently open, though you will need to make an appointment if you want to come in to see our collections. You can do that by making a request on our Ask a Librarian form online. We're going to start with a photograph of a sculpture of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and his first pupil, Alice Cogswell. In 1814, during a family visit, Gallaudet met Alice and found out that she was deaf. He tried communicating with her by writing H-A-T in some dirt. Alice understood what he was saying and that motivated him to travel to English and then on to France where he met Laurent Clerc. He was teaching there and taught some sign language to Gallaudet. The two of them returned to America and began the education of the deaf here using sign language. This is a portrait of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet. He was the founder of the American School for the Deaf. This is a lithograph, a print, of the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut. This print shows the first school for the deaf founded in the United States. It was opened in 1817 and it was originally called the Connecticut Asylum for the Education and Instruction of Deaf and Dumb Persons. That was later changed to the American School for the Deaf and that school is still in operation today. That term deaf and dumb, as well as deaf mute, those were commonly used terms during that period. Those terms were dropped in modern times because they were offensive to the deaf community. The accepted term now is deaf. I should also mentioned that the Library, we work hard to recognize that unacceptable language sometimes shows up in these resources and they have to be dealt with in that manner. Alexander Graham Bell, A.G. Bell, with the teachers and students of the Scott Circle School for Deaf Children. That's outside Washington, D.C. Most Americans know Bell as the inventor of the telephone, but many don't know that his main interest in life was the education of deaf children. And he was a strong proponent of auralism here in the United States. Bell and his father before him studied the physiology of speech. His mother was hard of hearing. She used an ear trumpet in order to communicate in one-on-one conversations. And Bell often used the British two-handed manual alphabet to communicate with her. He also knew the sign language he used here in the United States. And through articles, papers, speeches, and teaching, Bell's support of aural education profoundly changed the way that deaf children were taught. Bell was a pragmatist and was willing to use sign language or other means to communicate with deaf adults. But with children, he advocated a strict aural education without any sign language whatsoever. Bell remains a controversial figure in the deaf community still. Next, we'll show five pictures of schools for deaf children. After the American School for the Deaf was founded, many states had schools for deaf children, as well. However, in the last several years, several of those schools have closed because the number of students has dwindled primarily because of the deaf children being mainstreamed into hearing schools. The first picture here will be the Iowa School for the Deaf. [ Silence ] We'll now show six more photographs of deaf students at the Oklahoma School for the Deaf. These were taken by a photographer named Lewis Hine. Hine, himself, was a photographer who was well-known for taking pictures of child laborers in the early-20th century. These photographs are part of the National Child Labor Committee collection. The photos show students at a speech class and students learning a trade to prepare them for careers after graduation. [ Silence ] This is a picture of Edward Miner Gallaudet, EMG. He was the youngest son of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet. In 1857, he became the principal of the Columbia Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf, and Dumb, and Blind that is now Gallaudet University here in Washington, D.C. He would later serve as president of Gallaudet College for 46 years. He was a strong supporter and advocate of American Sign Language. He and his father are both revered figures in the deaf community. This is a photograph of Gallaudet College here in Washington, D.C. in 1897. It was previously called the Columbia Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf, Dumb, and Blind. In 1864, President Abraham Lincoln signed into a law a bill authorizing the institution to confer college degrees. In 1894, the name was changed to Gallaudet College in honor of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet. This is a photograph of Gallaudet University today. In 1896 - or 1986, excuse me, Congress granted the university status to Gallaudet. It's now called Gallaudet University. This is Chapel Hall built in 1870 and was - it was once the main hub of activity for the university. It was a chapel. It served as an auditorium. It was an exhibit center and a dining hall. It's a beautiful example of the high Victorian gothic buildings and is on the National Park Services' National Register of Historic Places. [ Silence ] This concludes my presentation. I hope you enjoyed the pictures and learned a bit about deaf history. I'll now turn it over to my colleague, Ellen Kays. >> Ellen Kays: Thank you, Pete. I'm Ellen Kays and I will be talking about several notable deaf people and various activities and events. I'm going to start with a print of a woman named Laura Bridgman. This is a print of Laura Bridgman with Oliver Caswell. They are reading a book with embossed letters. Laura Bridgman, born in 1829, died in '89, was born hearing but became deaf and blind after a bout of scarlet fever at the age of two. In 1837, when she was around eight, she was sent to the Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston. That's where she learned to read and communicate using braille and tactile signing. That was done under the direction of a man named Samuel Gridley Howe. Tactile signing is a method of communication using touch that's used by deaf blind people. So they put their hands over those of the person signing to follow what they're signing through the movement and touch. In later years, she lived at Perkins Institute and became friends with Anne Sullivan. She was not as well-known as Helen Keller, but she was considered the first known deaf blind person to be successfully educated in the United States. This is a picture of Helen Keller. She has her hands over those of another woman. That's probably Anne Sullivan, her teacher. Helen Keller was born hearing and sighted, and lost both her vision and her hearing at the age of 19 months after a severe illness. She communicated with her family using homemade signs until Anne Sullivan came into her life at around age seven. She taught Helen tactile signing reading and writing. And after Helen Keller had a varied education using different specialists and mainstream schools. She went to Radcliffe College. She became the first deaf blind person to specially earn a bachelor of arts degree. She was an author, a disability advocate, clinical activist, and a lecturer. This is a photograph of a deaf blind woman by the name of Katherine McGirr. She is using a typewriter to transcribe letters in braille to printed letters. This is a lithograph of a man by the name of Albert Newsam, the deaf artist. He was born deaf in Ohio and lost his parents as a baby. He was then sent to Pennsylvania and went to the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf, where he took up engraving and started an apprenticeship in 1827. He studied under a man named George Catlin, as well as several other engravers. Newsam's work was very good and was published by a man named Cephas G. Childs starting around 1829. After working for him, he became the principal artist for Peter S. Duval. He specialized in portraits, which he painted, as well as etching on stone to make lithographs. He also worked off the work of other artists and photographers such as Henry Inman and Gilbert Stuart. He created portraits of politicians, religious figures, and various wealthy people. He also created landscapes, and medical illustrations for medical books, and sheet music. This is a baseball card of center fielder William Hoy. He's best known as Dummy Hoy. Hoy was born hearing but became deaf at the age three. After graduating from the Ohio State School for the Deaf around 16, he opened a - actually, after graduating, he opened a shoe repair store in his hometown and played baseball on the weekends. Eventually earning a contract in 1886 with a team in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. In 1888 -- -- he started playing with the Washington Nationals in the National League. He became the third deaf player in the major leagues after a pitcher by the name of Ed Dundon and a pitcher named Tom Lynch. He played for several teams from 19 - from 1888 to 1902. Most notably with the Cincinnati Reds, the Washington Nationals, and the Washington Senators. He was the most accomplished deaf player in major league baseball history and was inducted into the Cincinnati Reds Hall of Fame in 2003. This is a glass negative of a famous deaf Indian artist named John Lewis Clark. He's carving a wood block in his studio. Clark is three-quarters Blackfoot Indian. He became deaf early in life after scarlet fever. He preferred to communicate using sign language, written notes, and through his magnificent art. He did drawings, paintings, relief panels, bronzes, clay figures, and especially wood carvings. Many of them explored Blackfoot themes, including the wildlife of Montana's East Glacier National Park, which was near his studio on the Blackfoot reservation. He tended to draw things like bears, bison, eagles, wildcats, mountain goats, all beautifully studied and depicted. He would even include small drawings and artworks in letters that he wrote to other people. He went to the North Dakota School for the Deaf and the Montana School for the Deaf and Blind. He didn't have a lot of formal art education. He would often sign his works with his Blackfoot name, Cutapuis, which means Man that Doesn't Speak. He had quite prolific output and a lot of recognition during his lifetime. And including the fact that John D. Rockefeller purchased several of his works. But he is a greatly underappreciated artist. This is a picture of two sisters, Frances Stebbins Allen, and her sister, Mary Electa Allen. Frances and Mary were both born hearing in Deerfield, Massachusetts. They became schoolteachers, but left teaching after losing their hearing. After that, they decided to take up photography. They ended up being very good at it, and in 1895, they were permanently exhibiting and selling photographic prints from their family home. Many of their works were never attributed to one sister or the other. Most of them just said the Misses Allen. They typically worked in four major themes, the life of children, natural scenery, the Deerfield arts and crafts movement. And models of Colonial life, showing what things looked like in Colonial times. They continued their work until the 1920s when Frances, the older sister, began to lose her vision. Gallaudet University had an exhibit of bear photography in 2006. [ Silence ] This is the drawing by a woman named Marilyn Church. She's hearing, herself. She's well-known for her courtroom drawings and fine art. The drawing is showing the proceedings in the courtroom during jury selection for the People of the State of New York v. Hector Guzman, the trial in New York. It shows a deaf man by the name of Alec Naiman who was hoping to become a juror using sign language with an ASL interpreter by the name of Aletha Cusaden. He was being questioned by the judge, Budd G. Goodman. The defendant, Hector Guzman, had a blind Spanish language interpreter sitting next to him, as well as his lawyer, Oscar Finkel. Naiman was, as I said, hoping to become the first deaf juror in New York, but was rejected by the attorney, Finkel, because of his disability. In 1990, with the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, deaf citizens finally attained the right to serve on juries. This is a poster designed by a deaf artist named Jena Floyd showing the signs for stay home. Jena Floyd also created the Starbucks ASL mugs. This poster was created during the COVID-19 pandemic and encouraged deaf people to stay home and keep safe. The next three photographs are showing Gallaudet students, Gallaudet University students, participating in various athletic activities, baseball and such, basketball, football. [ Silence ] This is a panoramic photograph. They use a wide shot of a group of women alumni at the Indiana School for the Deaf. This is a photograph showing several deaf girls dancing during what looks to be a May Day celebration. You see the maypole with the ribbons coming off of it in the picture and them dancing. This is a photograph of deaf children at St. Rita's School for the Deaf in Cincinnati. They're signing The Star-Spangled Banner. Star-Spangled Banner, to the flag. [ Silence ] I would also encourage you to contact Gallaudet University's archives if you want to know more about deaf history, as well. They have a very large collection there. The Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division has a much smaller collection comparatively. So I encourage you to contact both us and Gallaudet University. Thank you and I will now turn things over to Sara Duke. >> Sara Duke: Thank you, Pete and Ellen, for that great and insightful introduction to deaf history through our pictorial collections. Now I'm going to offer to all of you listening and reading an opportunity to explore the collections on your own. And I'm going to introduce you to the Prints and Photographs Division and our Prints and Photographs online catalog. So let's go ahead and explore the collection. There is so much that we offer to you from our web page. And so if you were to bookmark anything, it might very well be the Prints and Photographs Reading Room home page. Today, I'm going to talk about three specific things that I want you to take away. But you should feel free to come back and explore our collections on your own. There is a lot to see. So today, I'm going to talk about the Ask a Librarian service, copyright, and the Print and Photographs online catalog. So let's hone in on that, why don't we? The Ask a Librarian service is there on the lower right by the question mark. Our Information for Researchers, for those of you who can come in person, and for those of you who will never step foot in our buildings is there in the center left. As well as our copyright and restrictions information. And then the thing that you'll all want to know about which we'll spend most of our time today is the Prints and Photographs online catalog. And that's that top arrow on the left. Our Ask a Librarian service is the easiest way to access staff who are experts on pictorial collections. We offer the opportunity for you to pose questions and promise an answer within five business days, although we can often respond much sooner than that. It's also the form you're going to use if you want a slide set of today's presentation. And it's just a very useful form. One of the things that's really important because we're the copyright repository for the United States is rights and restrictions information. I've put a blue arrow next to that copyright and other restrictions that apply to publication and distribution of images. You'll want to review that when you're using our images for your publications or any dissemination other than classroom use. We also offer about 500 item-level descriptions and links to ask for specific permission from publishers, creators, a variety of people who are represented in our collections. So this is a good page to bookmark, as well. Before I move forward to talk about the Prints and Photographs online catalog. I want to talk about some other resources and just point them out to you that are available off the Prints and Photographs Reading Room. One of them is our list of images on popular topics. These are things that researchers most often want to know about and we offer a selection of images from our collection to make them readily accessible by theme. We also have an extensive and growing list of finding aids for particular collections. We don't have time to digitize all of our collections right now, so we make them accessible using finding aids so you can come in in-person and learn more about a particular group of materials. Let's talk about what you want to know, and that is how to get access to our 16.7 million images that are here in the Prints and Photographs Division. Let's talk about the search feature that we affectionately call PPOC. Let's go ahead and look at that. So there is a search toolbar and you can search on keywords. But remember, this doesn't function like Google, so the more keywords you put in to PPOC, the fewer results you'll get. If you're having trouble using it, you can always send us an Ask a Librarian request and we'll help you work it out. Below that search toolbar are item-level collections and there are about 100 of them. They focus on specific topics. So if you're searching for baseball cards, or photographs from the Great Depression, or posters, you might want to focus on a particular collection. I do want to talk about another feature of this page and that is going up and searching across the library catalogs. Every PPOC search page will offer you access back out to library-wide collections. The digital collections are just that. Those are the only the items that have been digitized. So anything that hasn't been digitized won't turn up. The library catalog offers you access to all of the library's collections and that includes books and pictorial materials that might be found in the Manuscript Division or the American Folklife Center. Even the Motion Picture Division. They all have pictorial materials, too. But we're just going to concentrate on the Prints and Photographs Division, today. So I began with the keyword search for the word deaf. And as you can see, I got over 200 results. But it turns out that my 200 results had a little bit of what we call noise in that I got returns for Deaf Smith County in Texas. As well as images of educational institutions for the deaf, deaf people, and things related to American Sign Language. When you do a keyword search, you're mostly going to get images from the turn of the early-20th century, although you can see from my search results that I got things from the 21st century, as well. But most of our collections date from the early-1900s, and so that's mostly what you're going to get. Although this search also turned up Jena Floyd's amplifier poster that Ellen talked about at the end of her presentation. So let's go ahead and look at other ways to search PPOC. One way is to search by creator, subject, or such formats as photographs, posters, or prints. You can control what you look for, and on this page, I did a search for subject, looking for D, trying to figure out better how we describe the deaf for you. And we have a - the Library of Congress Thesaurus for Graphic Materials. And so deaf persons is the term we use and you can see that there are a lot of images because the number in parentheses is the number that will turn up when you click on that link. If there's no number next to that link, then there's only one image. So let's go back and look at deaf people in PPOC. I want to point out some functionality of this page. When I searched on the generic deaf persons and didn't eliminate by a date range, I got 71 results. And what you see are a list of things that come back. Sometimes it's a collection like that first group of images from Congressional Quarterly. There's 35 photographs associated with that but none of them have been digitized. And so each item has a brief description that helps you understand what it is and when it's been digitized, there's a thumbnail image. That's the list view. Let's go ahead and look at the gallery view. When we look at gallery view, we get about 20 results per page and it is easier to see more readily what the images depict and whether or not they've been digitized. And this can be useful if you're not sure what you're looking for and you need a little bit of text to help you understand what you're seeing. There's another view, though, and that's the grid view. The grid view doesn't have any text except for when the image is not digitized or it's associated with our Look Magazine photographic archive. But it is really useful if you know exactly the type of image you want to see and you want to hone in on it. We tend to use this a lot when we are really sure we want to see a particular type of image and it's a way to go through the collections really quickly. It's much easier than you might think, especially if you want a portrait and not a cartoon. I want to take a moment to talk about exploring individual collections. There's no one collection here at the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division associated with deaf history, although Pete showed you a number of photographs from the Carol Highsmith Archive that featured deaf institutions. But you might be doing research on another topic that makes it really useful to look at a particular collection. And so I just want to highlight the information you can find when you explore an individual collection. You can always search within the collection or you can back out and search back across all of the collections. You can get a little bit more information about how the collection is organized, access rights and restrictions, what's in the collection, an associated bibliography. All of that is variable. Each individual collection has a different description, but we do our best to make it as transparent as possible what the collection contains. Now I want to talk a moment about how to get rights-free images and how to get access to images that haven't been digitized. In case you want to be the first person to access them and make them accessible to the public. So you can filter your results by whether and where a picture displays. So that if you are working on a project and you want access to images that are rights free or for which creators have made them readily accessible offsite. I want to show you a trick to toggle and control what returns to you. So look at that row of boxes of descriptions right next to that big, blue arrow on the left. In this search of deaf persons, there's a little orange box that says larger image available anywhere, larger image available only at the Library of Congress, and not digitized. Larger image available anywhere means that either the creator or the object has fallen into the public domain. And so when you toggle that box, you're going to be able to see images that you can download no matter who you are and no matter where you are. We've down the risk analysis and we don't think you're going to be violating copyright if you freely use those TIF files. Now people think that all of our collections are in the public domain and the answer is no. Some are and some aren't. We have a lot of collections from all over the world and from many different time periods. And because we're the copyright repository for the United States, we have to do our best to protect copyright. So that larger image available only at the Library of Congress means that the image may be rights restricted and we do not release it off the Library of Congress campus. You may feel free to come on site or purchase a copy of the digital image from the Library's duplication services. But we can't release it freely because we might be violating somebody's copyright. And finally, not digitized means just that. We're not holding back on you. Of the 16.7 million images in our collection, remember only 1.5 million have been digitized. So feel free to control your search for not digitized images if you're doing research and you think you might be - want to be the first person to access our content. We're always ready to serve our collections to you. So now I want to talk a little bit about no known restrictions on publication because that's another way that you can search to control your results. If you just want to see images that we are fairly certain are rights free. You can search on any word and the words no known restrictions and you will get to see rights-free images that you can use anywhere and access anywhere. Now I'm going to talk about particular catalog records so you can understand the elements and focus a little bit on rights, as well. Here's the image of the deaf children signing The Star-Spangled Banner that Ellen showed you during her portion of the presentation. And I want to talk a little bit about what this image is. This is a free-to-use image. You can download that TIF anywhere in the world. You can't actually come and see it in person and that's because it's a glass-plate negative and those are just too fragile and they're actually in reverse. We've made it into a positive for you. So we don't serve fragile objects in our Reading Room. The best way to access this is through your computer. But it has the rights advisory of no known restrictions on publication with a further link to the National Photo Company's description. Remember that rights and restrictions page I showed you at the beginning. The National Photograph Company has a description from that page, but it also appears from the catalog record. You can link to it here. Let's look at another catalog record. Here is that image of Helen Keller with a woman, perhaps Anne Sullivan. And I just want to point this out because we've been digitizing images for about 30 years. And some of our earlier images have fairly low-resolution files, so they're perfect for computer display but maybe are not quite suitable for publication. Your publisher would want a higher-resolution TIF. And so it's really important to look at the file size when you're accessing our content. This 1.8-megabyte TIF is a little too small to be used in a book publication or to be blown up on a wall for an exhibition. But I'll let you in on a little secret. We've gone ahead and digitized this from the original and so there's a nice big TIF file that's free to use. I also want to talk about Jena Floyd's Stay Home as a mode to look at different types of rights advisories. This poster, digital poster, has a nice, big TIF file associated with it and the rights advisory is may be restricted. And then I'll link to the amplifier. It turns out that Ms. Floyd uses a creative commons license so that she doesn't want her art manipulated or used for commercial reasons. Let's go ahead and look at that rights advisory. So when we know what the restrictions are, we'll make them as clear as possible for you and provide you with whatever information the creator or the publisher wants you to have. Some people only want to be contacted by a street address while others are fine with an e-mail or a telephone call. And the creative commons license tells you under what circumstances you may use a work of art. In this case, Ms. Floyd wants her name associated with the art, no commercial use, and otherwise you need to contact and ask for permission. So there are other ways to explore collections and I'm just going to take a moment to talk about other ways to learn about what we have. I know I've gone quickly today. So we offer up research and collection guides, and that can be about a particular collection or it can be about a newly processed collection that's mostly not digitized. And we're going to give you information about that so that you can come in and do research in person. This particular screenshot shows you the Farm Security Administration photographs from the Great Depression that are all digitized. It also shows you a guide to our Fine Print collection. Most of that's not digitized. And our newly processed Toni Frissell collection, and I believe they're working pretty hard to digitize some of those images to make them accessible to you. Our Picture This blog appears every week and you can control what you want to see by those categories on the left or you can subscribe and see what we have to offer. We often describe our events, our upcoming events. We describe newly processed collections or things that have captured our eyes and really intrigued us into learning more about them. We can also use the Library of Congress Office of Communications Instagram feed. Pictorial collections are often selected to be highlighted by the Library of Congress. And the Prints and Photographs Division has its own Flickr account. We put up rights-free images and we love to see how people comment on them and sometimes even correct our mistakes. We always love to learn more about our own collections and we encourage you to, if you are a Flickr member, to tag our images and comment on them. I want to thank you. There are so many opportunities to access virtual content from a lot of institutions around the world. And so I am grateful that you decided to take a moment to learn more about deaf history and the pictorial collections of the Library of Congress. And it's also my opportunity to give a shout out to the Interpretive Services Program, the Multimedia Group, and the Special Events Committee, which made this event possible. I couldn't have done it without all of the behind the scenes work and the people standing next to me. I also want to thank Pete and Ellen for joining me today. And for those of you joining us on April 12th and April 20th, we are here, and in person, and ready to ask your questions. And so feel free to pop your questions into the chat or into the Q&A and we will try to spend the next few minutes listening. If you're joining us after April 20th, then I'm going to encourage you to use that Ask a Librarian link because that's going to be the best way to reach out to us. And for all of you who want a PDF version of today's slide set, do so in Ask the Librarian request. Thank you.