Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Today I continued pulling negatives of photographs of the women's basketball team produced by my search of the AskSam database and scanned them.

I ultimately found photographs of the team from these years by searching the database:

1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, and 1986.

However, because of the way in which the negatives are labeled, I can't be sure yet of what teams these photographs show. The negative envelopes are labeled with the last three digits of the year in which the photographs were taken followed by a dash and a sequential number assigned to the photographs when they were developed. So, for instance, a set of negatives labeled 975-0173 would have been shot in 1975.

However, this doesn't tell me whether those negatives show the 1974-1975 team or the 1975-1976 team. If the images were taken in the spring of 1975, they show the 1974-1975 team, but if they were taken in the autumn of 1976, they show the 1975-1976.

The sequential number can provide some guidance since photographs shot near the beginning of 1975 probably depict the 1974-1975 team while photographs shot later in the year probably depict the 1975-1976. However, we need to be completely certain of the year in order to label these photographs for the basketball exhibit. Photographs may sometimes have been taken and not developed right away, so a photograph's position in the sequence of images shot during that year doesn't provide enough evidence to determine the team which that photograph depicts.

The only way to identify one of these photographs with complete certainty is to find it or a similar photograph of all the same people printed in one of the women's basketball media guides. At the end of the day, I started comparing the photographs I'd found to images in the media guides to try to identify the teams depicted in the photographs. I then named the files accordingly.