Society preserves steamship photos

Society preserves steamship photos    The Steamship Historical Society of America unveiled a new project to document the history of more than 40,000 lost and forgotten steamship navigation images dating from the 1850s through the 1980s.
   The project includes preservation of two collections:
   ' About 2,000 fragile and threatened large format glass plate images from many different regions around the U.S.
   ' Some 38,000 color slide photos depicting ships, ports, steam trains and people taken by the late Edward O. Clark, an historian and benefactor of the society.
   More than a decade ago the society acquired the Clark collection of images — which were unidentified and deteriorating — including maritime heritage, architecture and nature shots taken from land and sea. The additional glass plate images faded and suffered deterioration from mildew and storage issues.
   With the aid of a grant from The Champlin Foundations, the society cleaned, preserved and scanned all of the images for display online. The resulting database, called the Image Porthole, can be accessed via www.sshsa.org.
   SSHSA said its goal is to have members and the general public view the photos online, in a worldwide effort to help identify the collection.
   For more information, contact The Steamship Historical Society of America at 1029 Waterman Ave., East Providence, R.I. 02914, (401) 274-0805, or its Web site.