Monday, February 15, 2010

Today I continued identifying the photographs of women's basketball teams I scanned last week. The photograph shown in this post was labeled 77-298.3. (The "77-298" portion of the number appears on the negative envelope and indicates that the photograph was taken in 1977. The ".3" portion indicates the specific negative in that envelope which the image comes from.) The actual scan is of much higher quality. Not only is this image less than a third of the size of the actual scan, it also became very grainy because the old version of Paint Shop Pro I have can't handle tiff images. I had some trouble working around that to get a version of the image I could open in my paint program and save as a jpeg to upload to this blog.

This photograph was taken in 1977, but I haven't yet identified which team it depicts. Some of the earliest years of women's basketball did not have media guides produced for them and some of the early media guides did not include team photographs, which makes it more difficult to identify some of these photographs from the 1970s.

The AskSam database only gave me images up to 1986 when I performed a search for women's basketball team photographs. However, this does not mean that there are no photographs of the women's teams after this date, just that they have not been entered into the database. The only way for me to locate these later images is to go through all the sports contact sheets for the years we need and look for photographs of the women's basketball teams. I started doing that today. Since there are hundreds of contact sheets for each year, this will be a long process.