The purpose of this project is twofold:
1) to collect a large number of the public's personal collection of digitized photographs and display them for all to come and see at our May 12, 2023, Friday Night Fun event, and
2) to upload historically relevant, well-described, high-quality submissions to the Montana History Portal (MHP) where they will viewable within the Billings Public Library's Historic Photo Collection. If you took the photo, you will be attributed!
Photos can be submitted digitally through Facebook Messenger, by emailing them to refdesk@billingsmt.gov, on a flash drive, or through our Creative Commons Agreement and File Upload Form. This form will need to be completed by all contributors.
If you have photos that you would like to submit that are not digitized you can set up an appointment to use our Memory Lab to digitize images.
What you'll find on the Creative Commons Agreement and File Upload form:
In order for images to be considered for the May 12th event and addition to the library's Montana History Portal page, each field of the Image Details must be completed for each submitted image. Patrons may submit up to ten images.
Each field for every image uploaded will need to be filled. If you would like your image to be considered for upload to the Montana History Portal, please provide as much detail as possible (exact physical address, month/day/year, in-depth description).
Title: A short title describing what's shown or going on in the image.
Creator: Who took this photo? If it was not you, please name who did and your relation to this individual. Due to copyright concerns, ambiguous descriptions in this field may force us to disqualify the image for event display and upload to MHP.
Location: Please provide a physical street address if possible. If not, please describe where the image was taken with as much detail as possible.
Date: Month/day/year, or as close to the actual date as possible. Please refrain from using "circa" and provide at least the correct year the image was taken.
Description: Here's your chance to describe what the image portrays in detail. Where is this taken? What landmark is shown? What event was this taken at? What is the significance of this image? If possible, include the names of people shown in image.
If you have any questions, please contact us at refdesk@billingsmt.gov or lanningj@billingsmt.gov.