As I’ve written before, one of my major duties at the Ohio Historical Society is to add metadata to photos uploaded on the Ohio Memory website. (Metadata roughly is “information about information.” In this situation, it is the information about the photos which make them able to be accessed by text searches.) The Works Progress Administration had each state produce a book about the state. The book was part history and part tourism guide, but most importantly, producing the book put thousands of people to work during the Great Depression. The WPA employed many photographers from all over Ohio to take photos for the Ohio Guide.

I literally pull Ohio Guide photos out of folders and use what I see in the photo and what the photographer wrote on the back to add the metadata. Sometimes this task is easy. Some photographers actually typed the title of the picture, what it is and when it was taken all on the back of the photo. Sometimes, though, there is absolutely nothing to go on. The picture below is an example of a photo that had no accompanying information or text.

Photos like these can be frustrating because there is not much more to do than add generic metadata. (Writing, “This is a classroom,” isn’t exactly going to direct many people to the photo.) Before giving up on the photo, however, I noticed the distinct looking building seen outside of the window on the left. Usually when big and interesting buildings show up in Ohio Guide photos, they can be found somewhere else on the internet, so I decided to spend some extra time on this photo.

As a recent Ohio State University graduate, I thought first of looking around at OSU buildings that could potentially match the building seen out of the window. I knew I didn’t exactly recognize the building, so I started with looking at buildings that had been demolished. After a few searches, I began to think the building might be recently demolished Lord Hall.

The windows on the left of this photo matched up with the building seen in the left of the Ohio Guide photo. For one last confirmation I looked up some old photos of Stillman Hall and found that the windows in the Ohio Guide photo matched the windows in Stillman Hall.

Many people would find this internet treasure hunt more tedious than tantalizing, but I look forward to these challenges.

Nick — Ohio Historical Society