1. Why aren’t there photos for every building entry? Can I contribute a photo?
SAH Archipedia is a growing online resource, with much of its material derived from the Buildings of the United States print series, in which many entries were unillustrated. The Society of Architectural Historians is actively seeking photographs, as well as archival plans and drawings, for every building included on the site. Help us populate our image collection!
If you would like to submit a photograph you have taken, please prepare an email to photos@sah.org, including the image file (minimum 1024px for its longest side in a JPG or TIFF format) and following information:
- Title of Building
- Link from the citation (i.e, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/[ENTRY-ID])
- Caption (Optional, usually for sub-buildings or alternate views)
- Photo credit (no links)
If you have more than one image to share, please indicate that in your email, and we will arrange a location for a bulk file transfer.
We cannot publish any images for which we do not have permission. Photographs of privately owned buildings and sites require the written permission of the property owner if the photographer must a) step onto private property to obtain the photograph, or b) use a special lens to acquire an image that is not typically in public view. For public buildings, you will need permission if your camera is physically located on private property when the shot is taken. Interior photographs must be cleared in all of these instances.
2. I noticed that some tags for styles, building types, and materials are incorrect. Why?
The initial content of SAH Archipedia was derived from the published volumes of the Buildings of the United States series. In order to make this content fully discoverable for SAH Archipedia users, the editors have established semantic tags for styles, building types, and materials, based on the controlled vocabularies of the Getty Research Institute’s Art and Architecture Thesaurus. Given the scope of the original project, it was necessary to use an algorithm to generate these tags. Sometimes these machine-generated tags are amazingly accurate; other times they are too literal: for example, a building on “Federal Street” might have been tagged as a “Federal” style. Human review of machine-generated tags is ongoing and updates are made on a regular basis. Tags that have not yet been reviewed are flagged as such within SAH Archipedia. Born-digital content is accompanied by precise location metadata and peer-reviewed rich subject metadata based on controlled vocabularies. Our goal is to make the tags in SAH Archipedia as accurate and consistent as possible. Thanks for your patience.