Women pick foreign matter out of coal as it is carried on conveyor thru tipple. Union Pacific Coal Company, Stansbury Mine, Rock Springs, Sweetwater County, Wyoming. Source: NARA
The exhibition Power & Light: Russell Lee’s Coal Survey debuted at the National Archives in Washington, DC, on March 16, but the entire archival series is substantially larger than the 200 images on display. Archivists recently completed a months-long project to make the entire catalog digitally available to the public.
Power & Light: Russell Lee’s Coal Survey is open to the public through Sunday, December 7, 2025. The images from the 1946 coal mining survey gave Americans new insight to the conditions that miners, and their families, endured while risking their lives to power the nation.
“The photos in the exhibit, in the form of life-size murals, projected slide shows, and digital interactives, have had a powerful impact on the public,” said Alice Kamps, exhibit curator. “Individuals pictured in the show, their descendants, and people who have a connection to coal mining have told us what an honor it is to see themselves represented and celebrated at the National Archives in the nation’s capital.”
Digitizing the thousands of coal survey images required a tremendous effort. The high volume presented a considerable challenge. The end goal was the production of very high-resolution digital image files of sufficient quality to serve a range of staff and researcher needs, including for publication and presentation purposes. Furthermore, the Still Picture Branch needed to complete the task within a nine-month window, all while working with limited staffing, and around other high-priority scanning projects.
“The staff performed the systematic digitization of the entire series and simultaneously created separate scans just for the exhibit,” said Billy Wade, Supervisory Archivist with the Still Picture Branch of the National Archives at College Park. “For the systematic digitization—4,478 total images—a Canon digital camera was used with a light table and 4″ x 5″ negative holder. This produced images with over 7,000 pixels. For the exhibit, even higher resolution scans were needed, so we used an Epson V850 flatbed scanner. The Digitization Division scanned some of the images, due to the large size needed. The negatives were scanned in pieces, and the images were stitched together.”
Though the images may be new to the public at large, they have been well known at the National Archives for quite some time. Russell Lee was best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression, but his coal survey photographs arrived at the National Archives more than 50 years ago.
Lee’s photographs from the Medical Survey of the Bituminous Coal Industry (Record Group 245, Series MS) appear in multiple formats, including approximately 4,400 black-and-white film negatives (mostly 4″ x 5″ with scattered clusters of 2.5″ x 3.75″ entries and a small group of 5” x 7” entries), contact prints (4″ x 5″ or slightly smaller) corresponding to all the negatives, and more viewer-friendly mounted prints (8″ x 10″ on gray cardboard mounts) corresponding to roughly 3,000 of the negatives.
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
