The Album Collection at the George Eastman House is broad in scope ranging from a few albums by amateur photographers in the 1850's to 20th Century albums on black paper pages. The Collection strengths include 19th Century carte-de-visite albums, primarily American but with some examples of work by French and British studios, and albums of late 19th Century commercial travel views, primarily of European localities. In addition, there are a number of cabinet card albums ca. 1880-90, including portraits of stage celebrities. Nearly all of the 760 albums in the Collection are unpublished albums assembled by individuals or families for personal use, sometimes including hand-written captions and idiosyncratic arrangement of images. Some published photomechanical souvenir travel albums are also included in the Collection.

A growing number of records and a short description of the albums can be found in the database. To access these records:

From the menu page of the George Eastman House Photography database, press "9" and enter. This will take you to the FREE TEXT SEARCH page.

Tab down to *FORMAT and type "?"

The OBJECT-FORMAT LIST will appear; tab down to ALBUM and type "X"and enter. The FREE TEXT SEARCH (PHOTO QUERY) page will appear with ALBUM selected for the FORMAT search.

At the ENTER command, the number of albums with catalogue records will appear. Tab down to this information and type "V" and enter. A check list of the first 20 album entries in the database will appear. You may select any one of these, or select the first entry and continue to page down the list of the 20 albums.

At each record, type "T" and enter to continue to the TEXT page for a brief description of the album.

At the end of 20 records. the list will reappear. Press ENTER to move to the next 20 records and continue as above.

To return to the listing of 20 records from the first page of any individual record, type "." and enter