Oh wow, I was SO glad to see this article in the Library of Congress Blog yesterday. The LOC has an incredible archive of prints and photographs (over 1.25 million!), the but nav for them has always been icko. The blog announced a new version of the Prints and Photographs Online Catalog, now available at http://www.loc.gov/pictures/.

This new front page has featured collections on the front as well as a regular list of collections and a search box. I did a search for snowball fight, remembering a sketch from a Civil War drawings collection I’d seen. I didn’t find that (I actually found it doing a search for snowballs), but I did get several pictures of kids having snowball fights and even a comic page from R.F. Outcault. Group records and records that are unfortunately not digitized are clearly marked.

Individual record pages are cleaned up and easier to view. It seems to me like getting larger images is a bit easier. The LOC is also going social media full force, with links for getting RSS feeds and sharing content all over the place.

The LOC has some amazing image collections but I always cringed at visiting the prints and photographs site because it seemed difficult to navigate and search, and the URLs were such that it really was tough to share them. This revamp is excellent, with a good integration of social media. Nice.