Keystone-Mast Collection
Owning Institution: UC Riverside, California Museum of Photography
About this Collection
UCR-California Museum of Photography faces the challenge of providing ready, useful and intellectual access to a valuable body of cultural and educational resources of interest to the general public and scholars alike. Consisting of 250,000 stereoscopic glass-plate and film negatives and 100,000 vintage prints, UCR-California Museum of Photography's Keystone-Mast Collection is the archive of the Keystone View Company of Meadville, PA (active from 1892-1963). As a collection, it is the world's largest body of original stereoscopic negatives and prints providing an encyclopedic view of global cultural history. Formed over the period of the United States' emergence as a world power, Keystone-Mast not only chronicles an age, it also represents in pictures a dominant point of view about the world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is an important tool for among others, anthropologists, art historians, cultural studies scholars, historians, political scientists and sociologists. The provides online access to approximately twenty percent (approximately 28,872) of the total stereographic collection. To date, it represents content from the following geopolitical subject areas: entries from North America, from Central America, from West Indies (Caribbean Islands), from South America, from Oceania, from Asia, from Africa, and from the Middle East. When finished, the collection guide will consist of well over 100,000 online stereoviews complete with metadata.This digitization initiative, which was completed through a National Endowment for the Humanities Preservation and Access grant, has contributed an additional 13,155 stereoscopic views of the Middle East and southern Asia, including views of Algeria, Egypt, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Morocco, Pakistan, Syria, Tunisia, and Turkey. View collection guide.
View our statement on digital primary resources and historical description.
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