Digital Collections: Now Available Online via the KC Library: Over 500,000 Photos From the Kansas City Star’s Historical Photo Archives

\From the  Kansas City Star (via the Kansas City Public Library):

Today, I’m excited to announce the launch of KCStarPhotos.org, a new project from the Kansas City Public Library and The Kansas City Star. It’s a free website with a database of hundreds of thousands of images from The Star’s archives of the pre-digital era of photography. It’s searchable by keyword and has also been organized by topics such as jazz musicians, Crown Center, and the BOTAR Ball.

It’s a fascinating and unique collection that has been out of the public eye for decades in The Star’s offices, where its images were used in regular news production. And how it made its way to this new website is a twisted tale involving FBI raids, cocaine and even a nefariously altered Heisman Trophy.

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In 2022, The Star gave the library a copy of the Rogers Photo scans and programmers went to work extracting captions, which had been converted to text and paired with the relevant images. Then they created a searchable database and designers produced the KCStarPhotos.org site, which is cleverly organized and features a “Surprise Me” function that will keep you clicking. The content and quality of the images vary. Many were taken by Star staff photographers, but others are publicity photos or shots from wire services. There is no way to determine where a large number of them originated, as they had no identifying information attached in the envelopes. You’ll often be able to spot the hand-retouching required for images to reproduce clearly in the days before Photoshop.

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Direct to KCStarPhotos.org

Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Digital Collections, Interactive Tools, Libraries, News, Public Libraries