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"William Gray Purcell Job Files" digital images database (launches new browser window)
Images System, University of Minnesota Libraries
The original Images project at the University of Minnesota Libraries was subtitled "Metadata Aggregator for Campus Digital Collections," and in the early 2010s was renamed U Media Archive. Using an XML coding system, this project provides digital access to facsimile documents from many significant archival collections held at the University of Minnesota. A portion of the Purcell Papers is mounted for Internet access, consisting of images found in the shelf boxes of the commission files in the Purcell and Elmslie Archives record group. Drawings (small sketches or reproductions of larger ones stored in flat files), occasional reductions of blueprints or working drawings, and photographs can be searched geographically, by date, string, and digital file name. Links to the U Media Archive citation pages are provided on my web site to offer another and perhaps more convenient approach to this resource; basically to organize the search returns more coherently and localize in one place results that may be scattered through many pages at U Media Archives. This approach here creates a nice "virtual" exhibit with materials not served by U Media Archives (e.g. text files) or which are not part of the Purcell Papers, such as the recent photographs of P&E buildings.
Regrettably, an extraordinary amount of useful information contained in the commission files has been omitted, apparently because it is not primarily graphical in nature. Ironically, the scanning of key correspondence, cost calculations, or significant notecards makes these documents into images which then convey information that is much more valuable than, say, some of the very bad photographs taken in the 1950s which appear abundantly. Sometimes a thousand words can be worth more than a picture. In addition, the vast majority of the Purcell and Elmslie drawings are stored in flat files whose contents are generally not included (to date) in the U Media Archive. Hopefully, the digitizing project will eventually add all of these materials.
There are also some document identification errors in the U Media Archive, which have been corrected here. For example, a leaded glass panel for the John Leuthold [aka Ward Beebe] house in St. Paul returns under a "Edna S. Purcell residence" query; there are a number of other like mistakes. The geographical sorts have problems, as a look at the listbox on the U Media Archive page reveals (e.g. there is no "Rhinelander, IL" or "Rose Valley, MN" work, being Rhinelander, Wisconsin, and Rose Valley, Pennsylvania, respectively). You should look at all permutations to get a complete return. There was also a recursion fault in the code that omits the last image from sets of 15+1, but this may have been subsequently repaired. [A sixteenth image may be indicated, but the web page did not allow for retrieval. A workaround for this is to search on the name of the commission, or similar keyword, but that does not always help when the query return set is still 15+1.]
In some cases, particularly with colored pencil sketches on tracing paper, the color of the U Media Archives digital thumbnails is greatly distorted. The images served for reference and zoom enlargement do not have this problem.
Finally, my suspicion is that the content of U Media Archive is harvested by a technical assembly crew, without the presence of someone who is sensitive to the content and context of the materials. The main thing to understand is that the University Libraries is lifting up hundreds of thousands of documents across numerous individual archives units; mass production processing may be the only practical approach. On the whole, the University of Minnesota Libraries online U Media Archive is an extremely useful resource that provides access to many documents not otherwise electronically available. It has only gotten better as time has passed; the body of these comments dates from 2001, and by 2015 the resource has greatly matured.
research courtesy mark hammons