Invisible Images: Pictures, Illustrations and Visual Data in the Text-Centric System of the Library

Abstract

This study investigates how the library information infrastructure steers not only the access, searchability and retrievability of the images it preserves but also, on a more profound level, how images are understood as sources of information. Using the National Library of Sweden as a case study it first outlines how images are handled and conceptualized – as single pictures, as illustrations secondary to text, or as visual data, repositories of iconographic visual content. Second, through close analysis of five types of images common in library collections in general, it examines how they are classified, demarcated and made accessible. As this study shows, both analogue and digital information infrastructures in the library are, on a very profound level, tailored for text. Such unuttered, even unconscious, text-centrism has the effect that images as sources of information are made literally and figuratively invisible.