There was a time when navigating the website of the Library of Congress was a bit of a chore. Collections of digitized artifacts were mixed with collections that simply listed availability of artifacts. Thankfully, in recent years the LOC has made a marked improvement in the ease which you can find digitized artifacts that are available to view and download. The best way to find those artifacts is to head to the Digital Collections section of the LOC. It was there that I found the Chronicling America collection and the Historic American Buildings Collection.

Historic American Buildings is a collection of more than 44,000 pictures, drawings, and documents about buildings in the United States. Within the collection there is subset of artifacts from the Historic American Landscapes Survey. It was in that collection that I found the featured image for this post. The image, View About Five Miles South of Chisana, Alaska, was taken as part of the survey.

You can browse and search the Historic American Buildings collection according to location, subject, format (PDF or image), and contributor.

Applications for Education
This collection could be useful to history students in need of some archival imagery to use in presentations and reports. I can also see this collection being of interest to art teachers looking for images to use illustrate changes in architecture over time and location.