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The Collation

Out with the old? The A.L.A. Portrait Index of 1906

To create more work space, we’re starting to sort through the hundreds of “ready reference” books that fill the shelves in the shared staff areas on Deck A, pulling out volumes that really don’t need to be kept that handy. For example,  it’s a safe bet that Art Information and the Internet (How to Find It, How to Use It), written in 1998, won’t be of much help in 2015. This project brought me face-to-face with the magnificent but totally out-moded A.L.A. Portrait Index—all 1600 pages of it—which I hadn’t looked at since Art History Bibliography and Library Methods class in 1993. Please allow me to introduce you to this venerable resource, created by the American Library Association and published by the Library of Congress in 1906. 1 Spoiler alert: the darned thing turns out to be useful to us after all.

Books on shelf

Four inches of shelf space taken up by the A.L.A. Portrait Index (Photo by Erin Blake)

The Portrait Index was designed “to enable librarians, authors, students, publishers, and editors to turn directly to portraits which would otherwise be found with difficulty or might elude their search altogether.” 2 Using this resource, they could look up any of tens of thousands of names to find the specific page of a book or periodical where that person’s picture appeared.  Here’s a sample, showing the start of Ben Jonson’s entry:

A.L.A. Portrait Index, page 776, top portion. Click image for link to full source (Source: Internet Archive)

A.L.A. Portrait Index, page 776, top portion. Click image for link to full source (Source: Internet Archive)

  1. All facts and figures about the A.L.A. Portrait Index come from its preface, by William Coolidge Lane.
  2. Preface, p. viii.
  3. Preface, p. ix.
  4. Preface, p. ix.
  5. Preface, p. viii.
  6. Groan!