The Map Department of the Bloomfield Library for the Humanities and Social Sciences has entered a new era, and with it yours truly, the map librarian. For the longest time, our cartographic collection consisted mainly of sheet maps and atlases. A few years ago, the library acquired a platform for viewing digital materials. The Geography Department of the Hebrew University allowed us to add to the platform their collection of scanned aerial photographs. I will write about that collection more extensively in another post. The photographs, mainly of our area but also some of the countries around us, date from the First World War and after that, roughly till the end of the British Mandate period. Most of them were made by photographic reconnaissance units of the German and British air force. It is possible to view then in our digital collections.
For me this meant a time of learning about a new field. Though aerial photographs are classified as cartographic materials, they are very different from maps.
The digital collections site is a work in progress, and every time I work on it I discover new things. We cataloged the whole collection of aerial photos in batch, which means the cataloging is very rudimentary and not very accurate. From time to time I try to perfect the cataloging record of a few photographs.
Today I reviewed a series in the collection called 'Airborne 1'. The series has only 19 items in our collection (no doubt there are many more). All 19 were photographed on the same date: December 7 1945. I used my newly acquired knowledge of the 007 Marc field for remote sensing images to improve the cataloging records. In the 007 field for remote sensing images (a broader term for aerial photographs, including f.i. satellite photographs) one can describe the aerial photographs for many details, such as percent of cloud cover (if clouds cover part of the area in the photo) and altitude of the aircraft.
All 19 images have a description of sorts in the lower margin, consisting of the number of the photograph, the name of the air force division, the date, the focal length of the lens and the altitude of the aircraft. I was focused on the altitude of the aircraft, and I looked at several of the photographs before I noticed something in the lower right corner. A kind of blob, it seemed at first, but there was a shape to it. When I focused on it it turned out to look like a horse with something on its back. I did immediately think of Pegasus, the winged horse of Greek mythology, but it seemed that there was something additional on its back.
It turns out to be the emblem for the paratroopers of the R.A.F. Airborne 1 division (and for the 6th division, but we don't have aerial photographs of them).
https://images.app.goo.gl/nYJb7ktDziK2A4nt9
Here you can read the story of Bellerophon and Pegasus.
The same Airborne 1 that used this image as its sleeve badge apparently put the image on its aerial photographs. I wonder how they did it!
