ILR Kheel Center labor photos on Web

A digital collection of more than 1,000 photographs documenting the 95-year history of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) is now available on the Web.

Drawn from among the 350,000 labor union and work photographs held by the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives at the Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations' Catherwood Library, the images in this database may be searched at http://www.laborphotos.cornell.edu.

The labor photos image database consists of photographs of work, union activities and important events in American labor history. "The resources it makes available are of potential interest to scholars of labor and working class history, gender studies, immigration and ethnic studies, and to union members, students, teachers, filmmakers, artists and publishers," said Richard Strassberg, director of the Kheel Center and associate director of the Catherwood Library.

The project is designed to support teaching and research at the ILR School. The images available in the labor photos database are continually expanded to encompass photographs from the center's varied collections. Users of this database can save selected images for later review and order reproductions as digital files or photographic reprints.

The Kheel Center, http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/library/kheel, is Catherwood Library's special collections unit and is one of the country's leading archives of industrial and labor relations, holding nearly 28 million historical items. Its holdings include the definitive historical records of 14 international unions, including those of the ILGWU, its sister union the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union and the two unions' ultimate successor, UNITE-HERE. Center collections are rich in background material on pioneering federal regulatory and state protective labor legislation. Also available at the center are the records of professional organizations in related fields as well as the papers of more than 500 individuals prominent in the field of industrial relations.

For more information, contact Barbara Morley, Kheel Center media curator, at kheel_center@cornell.edu.