Warning sign: Building a sensitive content filter for historical news photography

Abstract

The John C. Wyatt Lexington Herald-Leader Photographs Collection contains historical photographic images documenting 20th-century Lexington, Kentucky. The collection is housed at the University of Kentucky Libraries Special Collections Research Center. To provide access to the collection, a digital library was designed and built using the Omeka open source web publishing platform. The digital library contains both published and unpublished news photography, including some content considered potentially sensitive, such as crime scene documentation and automobile accidents. This paper describes the collection, discusses the roles of sensitive content filters for online access, and the creation, from the technical and user experience viewpoints, of a custom sensitive content filter at the University of Kentucky Libraries Special Collection Research Center.