Why Archives Go Digital: Longfellow House and NPGallery

The accordion-style "Longfellow-san's album," about 15 pounds, holds Felice Beato's photographs from Charles Appleton Longfellow's 1872–1873 journey to Japan and needs careful, limited handling. NPS/Evgenia Diakonenko.

Why digitize?

Digital collections make searching, zooming, downloading and sorting a few clicks away, and open new kinds of research — computer-assisted study of large bodies of text, analysis of cultural trends, even visual search of artworks. Two reasons matter most for archives: preservation and public access.

Preservation

Every time someone handles an original, its life gets shorter. Digital surrogates reduce handling, light, humidity and contact with hands and germs — and may one day be the only record of an original that decays or is destroyed.

• The Cave of Altamira, with its prehistoric charcoal drawings, got a replica in 2001 to protect the real site.
• The illuminated manuscript Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry is too fragile to show at the Musée Condé, but a digital copy lets anyone zoom in and turn its pages.

At Longfellow House–Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site:

• Charles Appleton Longfellow's East Asia travel photographs fill an enormous accordion album that takes at least two people and plenty of space to handle, and some items still need a paper conservator. Digital copies of the albums spare the originals.
• His tattoo portraits (about 1885), on heavy, fragile glass-plate negatives that can crack or flake when handled, are among the most requested items. A scan of each plate, turned into a positive image, serves researchers while the glass stays in its box.

Glass negatives of Charles Appleton Longfellow showing his tattooed back and front, about 1885. NPS/Evgenia Diakonenko.

The positive image made from one of the negatives, which shows far more detail than the reversed glass original. Scan by the Northeast Document Conservation Center.

Public access: NPGallery

NPGallery is the Park Service's Digital Asset Management System (DAMS) — software that stores, organizes and shares images, video and documents — where parks post material from their archives for free public use.

Searching NPGallery

• Start with a clear research question: a search on George Washington alone returns 427,831 assets.
• Filter by state, park, format (image, video, album, document) and collection. For example, choose the Longfellow House museum collection, then add the keyword "drawing" to find drawings — and objects that have drawings on them.

The Longfellow House digital archive portal on NPGallery. NPS.

The Longfellow digital archive portal holds scans of selected personal papers and photographs, chosen for rarity, fragility and research interest:

• Browse by collection: drop-down menus follow the archive's hierarchy — collection, series, file unit — as described in the park's finding aids.
• Keyword search: choose All Words (AND), Any Words (OR) or an exact Phrase. Keywords are assigned by an archivist, and people appear under full standardized names — "Fanny (Appleton) Longfellow (1817-1861)."
• Try it: search Charles Sumner, the family friend and Fanny Longfellow's correspondent. "Charles" alone catches Charles Longfellow, Charles Appleton, Sir Charles Lyell and more; "Sumner" finds mentions by surname; filtering to the Frances Appleton Longfellow Papers excludes later material by William Sumner Appleton.
• Views: Grid for browsing photographs, List for descriptions and transcriptions, Gallery for manuscripts. Image Information and Downloads opens the zoomable image with full metadata.

Frances (Appleton) Longfellow to Matilda Lieber, 19 September 1837 — "cross-written," with lines at right angles over each other. A searchable transcription makes it readable. NPS.

New possibilities

A digital collection is a new resource that depends on good metadata. Once online, it can be found by researchers and search engines, measured, text-mined, and used in digital humanities projects. For Longfellow House — a striking eighteenth- and nineteenth-century house and gardens with the family's journals, manuscripts, photographs, design records and art — digitization lets educators and researchers everywhere use its archives.

Sources

Based on Evgenia Diakonenko, "Access Granted: Unlocking Archival Potential with Digitization," Longfellow House–Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site, National Park Service (2021); a work of the United States government in the public domain. The reversed negative scan and an NPGallery home-page screenshot are left out.