For many librarians, the urge to collect and preserve the record of human culture isn’t checked at the door on the way out of the office. Just ask Mary Noble, who worked as a cataloger for over three decades at the University of Iowa Libraries. In her off hours, she scoured flea markets and antique stores for items to augment her personal collection of historic photographs, glass plate negatives, photographic postcards and related materials.

Since it’s also difficult for librarians to resist sharing information, Mary donated her collection to the Iowa Women’s Archives in 1992; the materials have since become a valuable resource for scholarship on women’s history, Iowa history, and photography. She continues to purchase new items for the IWA’s Noble Photograph Collection, which has shifted in focus to emphasize women photographers and images of women; Mary states that additional selection criteria include “images… that I hope will be useful, interesting or just plain fun.”

These qualities have also made the materials good candidates for digitization. In 2000, the UI’s School of Library and Information Sciences featured the Noble collection in a web exhibit created as a student group project. More recently, DLS has begun a comprehensive approach to building a Noble digital collection, starting with its postcard series. The wider access afforded by digitization should please researchers both locally and worldwide. And, not least of all, its former owner, who states: “While I do not believe that each picture is worth a thousand words, they do contribute to the complete picture of women’s lives in the state, and having them carefully digitized and made available to the wide world is just terrific.”

–Jen Wolfe
Metadata Librarian