Library of Congress's American Memory - Brief Article

Architectural Review, The, June, 2001

On the other hand there are some sites which are ostensibly for a highly specialized audience and which are an active pleasure to use. One such is http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ gschtml/gotthome.html which is part of the Library of Congress's American Memory collection of seven million digital items.

This is a collection of 29 000 digitized images of photographs of twentieth-century American architecture and interiors taken between 1935 and 1955 by Samuel Gottscho and William Schleisner. You can search by keywords or by subject and the thumbnails come up reasonably smartly. Although the site's visual design is a tad 1950s, everything works, no cannot-be-founds, the taxonomy is uncontroversial and the images, naturally of variable quality, arc, as an ensemble, completely riveting.