What's Up - Your guide to what's happening in Fayetteville, AR this week!
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further is overlaid on the left side. "If you look closely, you can see the silhouette of the photographer reflected in the subject's eyes. What other details can you see?" the description reads. Albright's personal favorite is another of the enlarged photos further down the hall of a World War II ship full of soldiers heading back to the United States. She likens it to a Renaissance painting, where a lot of people are shown doing a variety of things. "It fascinates me," Albright says. "It's black and white and started as a negative. If you glance at (the negative), you won't realize the depth and richness of the photo. But digitize it to look at it, and you'll see all these men doing all kinds of things— chatting, playing cards, smoking and sleeping." Having so many photos means that many are in various stages of deterioration. Museum staff and volunteers try to digitize them before they're too far gone, but some formats are especially fragile. Albright says special storage to keep the photos at a cooler temperature to decrease the rate of decay is something the museum doesn't have just yet, so staff members feel an urgency with this process. With so many photos to get to, it can be difficult to decide where to begin. Research specialist Rachel Whitaker and Bo Williams, a former Shiloh employee, were the first two to take on the digitization, working with one collection and group at a time to save and preserve the images, and then to make them accessible to the public. Eventually the collections will be searchable on the Shiloh Museum website, then visitors won't be so tied to making appointments during business hours if they're looking for something in particular. One place they started was a collection gifted to them by the Washington County Historical Society. Visitors can view several images from that collection in an interactive photo album, a touch screen display in "Digi Know?" "The photos are just remarkable and of course span a lot of different decades," Albright says. "There's real diversity in those photos too. … We're talking about the whole history of a county, so you're finding photos of every kind of person and every situation, lots of different economic classes. Those are fun to scroll through and get a glimpse of what life was like." Another of the interactive digital photo albums is actually akin to a late 1800s/early 1900s version of a funeral or memorial slideshow. Flipping through the pages of this album gives viewers a look at this family's life thanks to the album that the deceased's brother put together in memory of him. A copystand between the digital albums shows guests how to digitize images themselves. Those interested should plan on returning to Shiloh Museum next year for a planned workshop that will explain what digital deterioration is and how to preserve your own physical images. Albright imagines that completing the museum's digitization process will take years, but she admits that it's always going to be ongoing, given the fluctuation of donations made to the museum. They're always receiving new- to-them photos. Now, with social media, the museum staff can crowd source identification of photo subjects at times, but otherwise they use the context of the photo to help date it — by clothes, farm equipment, etc. There are plenty of unknowns in the collections, as with any family's — those vacation and road trip photos as people pass through, those people you never really understood ending up in the box. That lends some excitement to the process of sharing it with the larger community, Albright says. The large photo of the newlywed couple is one that remains unidentified. "I hope someone walks in and says 'That looks like my great-great grandfather," she says. "We think it would be fun … to have a hint." 38 WHAT'S UP! AUGUST 7-13, 2022 PRESIDENT Brent A. Powers EDITOR Becca Martin-Brown 479-872-5054 bmartin@nwaonline.com Twitter: NWAbecca REPORTERS Monica Hooper mhooper@nwaonline.com April Wallace awallace@nwaonline.com (479) 770-3746 DESIGNER Deb Harvell ! UP WHAT'S ON THE COVER Shereen Ahmed portrays Eliza Doolittle in the Lincoln Center Theater Production of Lerner & Loewe's "My Fair Lady," opening the Broadway season Aug. 9 at the Walton Arts Center. (COURTESY PHOTO/JOAN MARCUS) What's Up! is a publication of the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Digi Continued From Page 4 Julian Eltinge, a female impersonator, is shown here in 1919 in Fayetteville. Next to it is an advertisement for his revue on silver gelatin print. (Photo by Davis Photo Service, donated by the Washington County Historical Society Collection) This image taken circa 1910 is of Nick Clemmons in Fayetteville. It's one of the many donated as part of the Washington County Historical Society Collection. Visitors can view a large, digital album of these images in "Digi Know?" at Shiloh Museum of Ozark History. (Photo by B.E. Grabill) SPRINGDALE