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The organization of the FSA/OWI photographic prints into their present arrangement began when the collection was still at the Office of War Information. Roy Stryker, head of the photo unit, hired Paul Vanderbilt to organize the file. Vanderbilt devised the arrangement with an eye to facilitating cross-regional and cross-cultural comparisons by subject matter, using an alpha-numeric classification system to group images first by geographical location depicted and then by subject matter. Vanderbilt accompanied the file when the Office of War Information transferred it to the Library of Congress starting in 1944.
The FSA/OWI photographic prints continue to be filed in the arrangement Vanderbilt devised. He apparently planned to incorporate images from other sources, but the division did not use the classification scheme for other collections. Generally, subject access to other collections, regardless of media or type of storage, is through standardized subject terms, including terms drawn from the Library of Congress Thesaurus for Graphic Materials.
Although Vanderbilt established the classification scheme to facilitate subject browsing of the photographs, his conception relied on geography as the initial principle of arrangement. He devised the following geographic categories, some of which likely corresponded to the regional breakdown of the FSA offices:
In accordance with his ambitious plan to incorporate other photographs into the file, Vanderbilt proposed additional categories for regions around the world, with B-L representing the western hemisphere and Atlantic Ocean, M-Z the eastern hemisphere and the Pacific. Those additional categories were never used.
Within each geographic region, the photographs are arranged according to subject classification numbers. The classification scheme is a "decimal" classification scheme, similar in principle to the Dewey Decimal classification scheme used to arrange books in many libraries: single digits or pairs of digits stand for broad subject areas, and longer numbers starting with those digits generally represent sub-sets of that subject area. Vanderbilt's classification scheme, however, emphasizes the kinds of subjects that appear in pictures--particularly the FSA/OWI pictures.
Unlike the Dewey Decimal classification, where each numerical category represents an area of knowledge (e.g., numbers in the 700s are for "the arts"), Vanderbilt does not seem to have started by isolating major subject classes under sequential numbers, 1-9. Rather, the predominance and depth of treatment of the respective subjects within the body of photographs seems to have dictated how many digits the classification scheme devotes to each. Some subjects span initial digits, as for instance "work" spans . 53-.65.
Based on the initial pages of an undated, 161-page manuscript in the Prints and Photographs Reading Room reference file that outlines the classification scheme, the major categories, with scope notes were:
| .14-.18 | The Land - the background of civilization |
|---|---|
| .2-.278 | Cities and Towns - as background |
| .3 | People--as such--without emphasis, excepting in the case of children, on their activity |
| .4 | Homes and Living Conditions |
| .5-.526 | Transportation |
| .53-.65 | Work - the economic basis for survival |
| .66-.69 | Organized society--for security, justice, regulation, and assistance |
| .7 | War [the manuscript lists this as .7-.72, but numbers up to .775 are indented under "War"] |
| .8-.83 | Medicine, health, first aid, war casualties, hospitals, dentistry, public health, sanitation, safety |
| .84-.85 | Religion, prayer, churches, clergy, revival meetings, ceremonies, education, missionaries |
| .86-.88 | Intellectual and creative activity, science (as distinct from technology), colleges and universities, museums, records, surveys, documentary work, journalism, editorial work, writing, representative and decorative arts |
| .89-.91 | Social and Personal Activity [the manuscript lists this as .89-.905, but numbers up to .92 are indented under "Social and Personal Activity"] |
| .92-.93 | Recreation, relaxation, outdoor life, sports, athletic contests, indoor games, gambling |
| .94 | Dissipation and crime |
| .96 | Alphabetical Section (for subjects not adequately covered above but better arranged in alphabetical order under subject headings) |
There are gaps in the decimal numbering, presumably where Vanderbilt was leaving room for additional subdivisions of a subject.
The classification scheme is not strictly hierarchical. Longer numbers that begin with the same digits as shorter numbers are often related, but are not sub-sets of the shorter number. The goal seems to have been to bring images with related subject matter into close proximity, rather than to lead from broader to narrower subjects.
Examples:
And
Although Vanderbilt’s classification scheme was numerical, he allowed for alphabetical arrangement near the end of the scheme, where category .96 represents "Subjects not adequately covered above, but better arranged in alphabetical order under subject headings." The headings include such categories as:
The classification scheme sometimes includes specified, named examples of the phenomenon represented by the class number without distinguishing the specific locations. For example, .596055 is the number assigned to both Greendale, Wisconsin, and Greenhills, Ohio--both locations where photographs show "Construction of Small Houses" (.596).
The definition of the categories that make up the classification scheme and the application of the scheme to particular photographs was necessarily a subjective process. For instance, it is unclear whether there are obvious visual markers that define category ".322 Men in their Prime."
Multiple staff attempting to classify photographs that inevitably feature more than one subject also faced a challenge in applying the classification numbers consistently. The manuscript document with scope notes for many classification numbers offers principles that likely guided staff as they assigned classification numbers. The scope note for .32 Men (and .33 Women) remarks: "In accordance with our general principle, we have judged a person's age according to his or her appearance except in those cases where the caption provided specific information. The picture of a prematurely-aged working woman may thus be filed under an age group beyond her actual - but unknown - age." As this comment suggests, and people who have regularly used the file have observed, the caption for the photograph is often the strongest indicator of the classification number under which the print was filed, even though each image can reasonably relate to multiple subjects.
In the 1940s, staff also made choices in setting up the physical arrangement of the photographs, as distinct from the classification numbers they assigned to the images. Staff did not consistently file the photographs by the specific number they assigned to the images if the contents of the numeric category were sparse. In some regions photos are grouped in a broader category. For example, the decimal classification number for "license plates" is .5104. The photographs with that designation are filed in the ".5104" section in the Northeast and Midwest regions. But the sole photo that was assigned number .5104 in the Far West region is interfiled with .51 (Automobiles).
