Research Guides
Visual Materials Research Guide
Check out the guide from our Visual Materials Curator, Nicolette Bromberg, to learn more about photograph, moving image, and architecture collections.
Photos can be found in photograph collections or within collections of personal papers, organizational records, or university records. Many are added to Digital Collections. Not all of our photograph holdings are digitized and online.
Photograph Collection Finding Aids
Most photograph collections are described in the online Collection Guides/Finding Aids database. Finding aids provide detailed descriptions of a collection, including background information about a collection and its context, identification of and description about the content of photographs or groups of photographs, and restriction information.
There are nearly 60,000 postcards in Special Collections, including a specific Northwest and Western Canada Postcard Collection. Most are arranged by topic or locality.
The Pacific Northwest postcards are especially strong in images depicting Native Americans, architecture and the built environment, transportation, town and city scenes, and depictions of industries such as logging and agriculture. The worldwide holdings include major European nations such as Germany, France, and Italy, as well as smaller groups from such places as Russia, Japan, China, South Africa, Argentina, and Egypt.