Library photos featured in Smithsonian magazine

Photographs from the Monroe County Public Library’s digital archive are featured in the September 2008 issue of Smithsonian magazine. In the article, “Seeing Is Believing”, senior editor Laura Helmuth describes how historical marine ecologists analyzed the library’s collection of vintage charter fishing photographs. “The most striking difference”, Helmuth writes, “is in the fish: they get smaller and fewer, and species disappear with the passage of time.”

The featured photographs are from 1957, 1958 and 1983 and show tourists with their prize catches from the Greyhound and Gulfstream charter fishing boats. Capts. Tony Tarracino and Tommy Lones are pictured.

Historian Tom Hambright and Library Administrator Anne Layton Rice have been digitizing and mounting web-based photo exhibits of the Library’s archives since 2001. These images have also been featured in Nature magazine and several books and TV productions. The Library’s digital collection can be viewed from the “Keys History Sites” link at www.keyslibraries.org.