The sky’s the limit for fans of railroads and photography who can happily immerse themselves in Odyssey, the Center for Railroad Photography & Art’s new collections management system. Odyssey is live and available to explore at this link.
The online portal was selected in June 2022 by CRP&A staff members to house digitized images from its collections. Over the past year, our archives team has worked closely with the platform’s developers to customize and implement the software. Dynamic and user-friendly, Odyssey will facilitate higher cataloging standards among Center staff and greater public searchability of collection materials. Users can explore all of the Center’s images that are available in its Flickr galleries, but now collected in a single location — as well as new offerings from John Gruber, Stan Kistler, David Mainey, and Jim Shaughnessy, with more to come from Richard Steinheimer and many others.
“The Center’s archives and digitization efforts have grown tremendously over the past few years, and Odyssey’s large storage capacity limit offers opportunities for even further collection development,” said Adrienne Evans, director of archives and collections. “We recently finished migrating all of our digital collections from Flickr to Odyssey and we’re excited to introduce everybody to the new portal. Being a new system, we’ll constantly make improvements as we expand the galleries to include more images from our growing collections.”
“After a lengthy search and implementation process, we’re excited to begin sharing more of our collections through Odyssey,” said Scott Lothes, president and executive director. “Our collections team has digitized tens of thousands of photographs in the past couple of years alone. We have so much to share with you.”
We’re deeply grateful for the generosity of donors and members who have made it possible to reach this milestone, and we encourage everyone to make their own odyssey! A search guide is available here.
Please direct any questions or comments to info [at] railphoto-art.org; follow the Center on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter for updates.
