The Prints and Photographs Online Catalog

Florida Beaches

I centered my gallery for this assignment on the beaches of Florida. I was born and raised in Florida and didn't leave the Sunshine State until my early 20s. Although I moved away, Florida still means the world to me, so I wanted photos that really captured the feeling of the state and not just the setting.

My goal was to find pictures of people and action rather than landscapes or buildings, but unfortunately, my search generally returned the latter.

I started with my focus on Daytona Beach in the 1950s. There were tons of photos from Bethune-Cookman College, which were really lovely, but again, not what I was looking for. When most of my searches only returned one page of results, I expanded my search to all Florida beaches. This search brought up 147 pages of results. Again though, I wanted fun and happy photos portraying the beach in Florida and this was hard to come by. The only term I had much luck with was "Florida Beach" — all of the other terms turned up very few results.

Terms searched:

• Beach 1950s
• Florida Fun
• Daytona Beach
• Florida ocean
• Florida Swimming
• mid century Florida
• vacation
• fifties
• Florida beach

Although I was very excited to search this site, I was disappointed with my experience. The Prints and Photographs Online Catalog site was very difficult to search and browse. I didn't like that once a user clicked on a photo you had to actually browse back to return to the search page. The photos were small and difficult to see, and very few searches supplied any results that I was looking for. The quality was also quite poor in viewing these photos. I would have liked a clearer picture of the image.

I believe my search would have been much more successful on Flickr. Because the Prints and Photographs Online Catalog is a history-based archive, it was much more difficult to unearth exactly what I wanted. The photos were catalogued based on historical importance, and fewer photos of people were included. If I was looking for a specific site with historical importance, such as Bethune-Cookman College, I would have discovered a lot more photos.

Check out my bookmarks at Delicious to see what photos I chose for Assignment 7.