Picturing the news: the intellectual arrangement and description of the Chatham Daily News collection

This thesis is an applied project in managing and preserving photographic press collections in museums and archives, focusing on the Chatham Daily News Collection at the Chatham-Kent Museum. The collection was donated by the Chatham Daily News to the museum in 1990 and consists of ca. 300,000 black and white negatives, ca. 10,000 black and white contact prints and 8 administrative record books from 1946 to 1987. This thesis addresses the growing occurrence of press collections that are donated to museums and archives for preservation, and what these institutions can do to make them more accessible. The project was comprised of an inventory, a standardized finding aid and a detailed container list. Data from a representative sample of the collection was gathered and analyzed in order to better understand and describe the negatives and the role that photography played as a tool of communication at the Chatham Daily News.