Kress Historical Negative Collection Digitization Project
The Department of Image Collections at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. is the official repository for the historic negatives of the Samuel H. Kress Collection. The negative collection was deposited at the National Gallery in 1977 with the agreement that they would be made available for research and publication. Recently, the National Gallery became concerned that these 5,600 historic negatives were beginning to degrade and so began exploring options for scanning. In 2008, the Kress Foundation provided a grant to the National Gallery for the digitization of these negatives and the mounting of the subsequent images online for public access. This summer, Melissa Beck Lemke, the Image Specialist for Italian Art at the Department of Image Collections at the National Gallery of Art, wrote a short article describing the Kress negative digitization project for the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS) newsletter.
To read the article, see the National Gallery of Art site:
http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/research/library/imagecollections/digitalprojects/digitization-of-the-kress-collection-.html
To browse the digitized Kress negatives see the National Gallery's Library site: https://library.nga.gov/discovery/search?query=any,contains,kress%20negative%20collection&tab=ImageCollections&search_scope=ImageCollections&vid=01NGA_INST:IMAGE&offset=0