In the archives department of virtually any big city is a photographic history, often stretching to the 19th century, going unseen by most of that locality's residents. But the city of Edmonton, Alberta, is taking its photographic story to the masses, posting 25,000 digitized photos from its archives through a searchable Web application called Presto from Inmagic. Edmonton has collected the photos throughout the years from local historical societies, newspapers and businesses.

"They include photographs of buildings and key individuals who played a role in the history of the city," explained Michael Payne, archivist for Edmonton.

People in the photos are often not prominent community figures.

"One guy discovered we had a photo of his uncle who played for a hockey team in the city that he hadn't known existed. He bought it for himself," Payne said. Citizens can order photos, which also include visually striking advertisements from local businesses, for purchase online

"People use the photos for their own personal research. If they're interested, for example, in working on a history of a house, building or whatever, they search our catalog," Payne said. "We have a fair number of businesses and individuals who purchase the photographs simply because they want to display them."

The application went live early this year, and the City of Edmonton Archives plans to add roughly 4,000 more photos in the next few months. Before the Presto deployment, the city offered around 10,000 photos on a different Web site with cumbersome functionality.

"It was done early on in the game when people were starting to do this sort of stuff," said Payne. "As a result, it was not easily expandable. Basically you had to upload records image-by-image, rather than by batch."

The old program's search engine was also imprecise, often yielding hundreds of irrelevant results.

Edmonton paid roughly $75,000 in vendor costs for the deployment, but Payne estimates that city employee time made the total cost around $125,000.

 Photo by POD. CC Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic