St. Lawrence University Students Catalog a Collection of Adirondack Photographs by Seneca Ray Stoddard
During the fall of 2024, two St. Lawrence University students, Autumn Nealis ’25 and Sophia Roxo ’26, teamed up with Gallery Director Catherine Tedford and Curator of Special Collections Paul Doty to digitize and catalogue a collection of over 130 historical Adirondack photographs by Seneca Ray Stoddard housed at the Owen D. Young Library.
Seneca Ray Stoddard (1844–1917) was a pioneering American landscape photographer known for capturing the rugged beauty of the Adirondack Mountains. Stoddard’s photographs and stereographs in the late 19th century offered viewers, especially those who had never visited the region, a unique glimpse into the untamed wilderness of upstate New York. His work became instrumental in raising awareness about the importance of preserving natural landscapes, contributing to early environmental conservation efforts.
As part of the project, Autumn and Sophia used professional standards to scan original artworks; learned protocols for cataloguing images; and incorporated generative AI to create item-level descriptions and Library of Congress subject headings for each image. The project was part of a community-based learning component of Dr. Mindy Pitre’s “Unpacking Museums” course, in which students are placed at various arts and cultural organizations in the region.
Tedford writes, “Paul and I had been talking for months about digitizing the Stoddard collection, so we jumped at the opportunity to bring in students from Mindy’s class to help. At the beginning, the four of us talked through the pros and cons of using AI in this work and agreed that a critical approach and oversight would be required. We were all very pleased with the results.”
The digital image collection has been published in Jstor and is now available online for teaching and research at https://www.jstor.org/site/stlawu/stoddard/.