Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library is continuing to expand the Frank Lloyd Wright (FLW) Digital Archive, an online resource launched in August 2024. Approximately 13,500 drawings are now publicly available online, and more will go live in the year ahead as additional material is digitized and processed.

It became evident as the project progressed that the impact of the online collection would be amplified by updating the descriptive text accompanying the digitized drawings. Greater detail and standardization of the description would enable the drawings to be more easily searchable by characteristics such as building type (residential, commercial, etc.), drawing type (section, elevation, etc.), geographical location, and the names of those involved in the project, such as designers and clients.

Much of this descriptive information can be gathered by studying the content of the drawings themselves. However, identifying the names of the clients is less straightforward, particularly for projects that were designed but never built, as unbuilt projects have historically received less scholarly attention than built works. Identifying names is doubly challenging for projects with women clients, as women were often referred to in the projects’ archival records as “Mrs. John Smith,” as was conventional at the time of their creation.

 

Changing a name from “Mrs. John Smith” to “Jane Smith” is not sufficient when describing archival material, however. The professional standard, Resource Description and Access (RDA) requires additional details, such as birth and death dates, to distinguish which Jane Smith we mean. That’s easier said than done when the person isn’t a well-known historical figure.

Research using archival correspondence, census records, genealogical documents, and tombstones has enabled the Avery team to add more than 400 previously unknown women clients’ names to our descriptions of the Wright archives, and equally as many men’s names to be brought up to archival standards, totaling more than 1,000 individual clients. This information will continue to reap benefits in years to come, as the clients’ names appear in other Wright-related collections at Avery, such as photographs and correspondence.

 

Collaboration across institutions is a mainstay in libraries and archives: we create and store information in ways that help our colleagues (and future selves) avoid reinventing the wheel. An impactful next step in the FLW Digital Archive project is to contribute our research and description to the collective “hive mind” so that it can be used by, and linked with, the work and collections of other institutions and individuals around the world. In addition to updating entries in the Library of Congress Name Authority File (LCNAF), we are preparing the data for batch-ingest into Wikidata, a platform and repository for linked open data.

A person’s name is the key that unlocks the possibility of further scholarship into their life story and historical impact. We are delighted that one outcome of the FLW Digital Archive project will be establishing a strong and accessible foundation for future research into hundreds of previously-unknown figures in Wright’s client base and intellectual orbit, and perhaps revealing the yet-untold stories about their influence on the growth and evolution of Wright’s lauded career.

— Katherine Prater

Digital Project & Outreach Librarian, Avery Library
Project Manager, Frank Lloyd Wright Digital Archive

 

Additional image information:

Fig. 1: Frank Lloyd Wright (center) with clients Roland (left) and Ronny Reisley (right). Project 5115: Roland and Ronny Reisley house (Pleasantville, New York). Usonia II. Photographer Pedro Guerrero. Photo no. 5115.0007. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York). You can browse the drawings for the Reisley house, and read more about their story here.

Fig. 2: Portraits and details of Wright’s clients, including dates of birth and death, as well as related people and design projects. This research forms the basis of Avery’s contributions to linked data through Wikidata and Library of Congress authority file records that are underway.

Fig. 3: Visualization of the expansion of client names in Avery’s Wright collections. At left, the legacy descriptions, totaling about 600, show primarily male client names (blue), with a small proportion of women’s names (red), corporate names (green), and family names (purple). At right, the result of the research, which added about 400 previously unknown women’s names to Wright’s client list.

Fig. 4: Newly-created and updated records in Wikidata and the Library of Congress Name Authority File based on Avery’s research and description. Examples include new Wikidata records for Harriet Freeman, a dancer and client of Frank Lloyd Wright and Jane Porter, Wright’s sister, for whom Wright also designed a home. Once a person has a Wikidata record, they can be linked to other records, such as Harriet Freeman with husband, Samuel Freeman; their house, the Freeman house; and their architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. Together, these entities and their relationships create a web of “linked open data” that can be expanded over time by other contributors. Library of Congress Name Authority files such as the Fabyan Villa Museum were newly-created, and others such as client Kathrine Winckler were corrected and/or enhanced based on our research.