The following is a guest post by Mitsuko Brooks, an Archives, History and Heritage Advanced (AHHA) intern at the Library of Congress. Brooks is in her final semester as a student at Queens College (CUNY) working towards a Master of Library Science degree with a certificate in Archives and Preservation of Cultural Materials.
This fall I worked in the Prints & Photographs Division on projects that combined visual literacy and subject indexing to improve the descriptions of images in online collections. One of my projects involved revising summary notes and adding subject headings to catalog records for War Relocation Authority (WRA) photographs that depict the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.
This photo of Little Tokyo was taken in one of the few Japantowns that still exist today. There were over forty in existence before World War II. I consulted historic business maps to provide more detail in the summary note of the catalog record.
You can read more and see more photographs at: https://bit.ly/3qZCKX2.