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Behind the Scenes: Making More Posters Discoverable
July 23, 2026, Posted by: Melissa Lindberg
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The following is an interview conducted by reference specialist Ryan Brubacher with Prints & Photographs Division Junior Fellow Ellie Harrison.
Ryan: Can you describe your background and how you came to this internship as part of the Junior Fellows Program (JFP)?
Ellie: I am currently pursuing dual master’s degrees in library science and art history at Indiana University Bloomington, where I also received my undergraduate degrees in art history and anthropology. I worked at the Indiana Historical Society before starting graduate school. At IU, I catalog artists’ books in my library’s technical services department, and I’m an assistant at our university archives. I had heard about the Junior Fellows Program from other students and decided to apply last fall. I was immediately drawn to the Prints and Photographs Division’s project with the poster collection, as I’m interested in design history and would like to work with visual materials in my future career. It has been wonderful to get hands-on experience with such an incredible collection of posters!
Ryan: Many people are familiar with some of our poster collections that have a large online presence like the WPA posters, but you were mostly engaged with posters with limited means of access. How did you look for and select the portions of the posters you wanted to dig into?
Ellie: Early on in the internship, I chose to work on a group of posters gifted by concert promoter Bill Graham, which sparked my interest due to my experience researching other American art from the middle of the twentieth century. Graham, along with Family Dog Productions, hired artists to create psychedelic posters for their San Francisco rock concerts in the late 1960s and early 1970s. To get a better sense of the collection, I first reviewed the few existing examples in the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC). I also looked at reference materials; this group of posters has the benefit of being represented in the book “The Art of Rock” by Paul Grushkin, which features color images of each poster made for Graham and Family Dog. The layered patterns and psychedelic fonts, like those in this 1966 Wes Wilson poster, caught my eye:
For other projects, I utilized the card catalog or simply browsed the map cases where the posters are stored. For example, when selecting items for Display Day [an event where Junior Fellows from across the Library share their work], I knew that I wanted to include some 19th- century examples of Art Nouveau posters that had been influential to the 1960s psychedelic posters I was working with. Because I wanted to prioritize displaying items that hadn’t been digitized yet, I searched the card catalog using different access points, including country (Austria, Germany, Czech Republic, etc.), year, and artist. After making a list of the most promising posters, I went to look at them in the vaults and narrowed my selection from there.
This poster (below) for Bradley His Book was one of my favorites. It exemplifies Will Bradley’s distinctive woodblock print-inspired style and shares a close resemblance to one of Wes Wilson’s posters for The Byrds. A similar teardrop-shaped peacock feather pattern can also be seen in Wilson’s poster for Captain Beefheart, shown above.
Ryan: A question we are asked all the time in P&P is “what is your favorite”, and none of us has an easy time answering, but I’ll give you a similar prompt – what particular posters stood out to you, or captured your interest? Any favorite artists or categories or particular items?
Ellie: I really enjoyed looking at the posters sponsored by the Puerto Rican Division of Community Education. The posters all promote Puerto Rican social services and cultural traditions, but each artist presents the Division’s message with a unique perspective and style. I especially liked Antonio Maldonado’s posters and his use of vibrant colors. This one (below), designed by Isabel Bernal, reproduces a family photograph using silkscreen. I like how Bernal translates the personal into a poster designed for public appeal.
The creative letterforms used by artists of the early 19th century and 1960s alike also stood out to me. Some of their lettering is so warped and stylized that it becomes barely legible. These cases prompted me to think about the purpose of text on posters and how meaning can be communicated through the presentation, rather than objective definition, of words. This 1896 poster, which promotes a Dresden art establishment, utilizes ornate hand-lettering to show off the printing shop’s design abilities. (Although, I’m still not entirely sure what the artist was going for with the “K” design!)
Finally, I found an original Picasso poster for an exposition in Vallauris, France, while inventorying the original artwork posters. This was pretty fun to stumble across!
Ryan: I spent time early with you setting up projects and doing some training, but towards the end of the internship you were organizing your day independently around the couple ongoing tasks. Can you walk through a sort of typical day?
Ellie: In the morning, I’ll review my checklist to see what else I need to complete for each ongoing project. I then usually retrieve the materials I’ll be working with for the day and begin my main project of creating item records in a spreadsheet, referencing both the card catalog and the items themselves. Sometimes mornings will also include a JFP tour of another division in the library. In the afternoon, after a potential JFP Professional Development Series session, I will usually work on a smaller project for a little bit; for example, I’d add images to the Travel Posters Research Guide or inventory unprocessed materials like the original artwork posters. I will usually finish the day by creating more spreadsheet records and reviewing my progress with the projects.
Ryan: Do you recall any highlights of particular moments that were exciting or meaningful as you worked?
Ellie: I ran into some difficulties when deciding on how to best label the printmaking technique used for the psychedelic rock posters, but I think it turned out to be a valuable learning experience. I saw inconsistent terminology used to describe the posters in other museum collections that held the materials; some sources described the posters only as lithographs, but others said they were offset lithographs. Although not all posters were labeled with printers, Tea Lautrec Litho was a known offset lithography printing company that worked with Bill Graham’s artists, so it was likely that offset lithography was the primary method used for the posters. Even still, I took the opportunity to practice some close looking techniques to see if I could determine the difference between lithographs and offset lithographs using a loupe (small magnifier) and pocket microscope. It proved difficult to determine the visual differences between these similar techniques, so in most cases, I labeled the posters as offset lithographs based primarily on context clues. This experience helped me better understand the various methods involved in print identification and the challenges that come with the process.
Ryan: Any surprises? Good rabbit holes?
Ellie: It was really interesting to learn about some of the lesser-known poster artists in the psychedelic poster collection. Some were very young when they had their posters published; for example, Mari Tepper was only in her early 20s when she created her posters for Bill Graham, and Dottie Simmons was a teenager when Family Dog Productions published her poster. Even more prolific artists, like Wes Wilson and David Singer, often didn’t have formal artistic training before beginning their work as poster designers. Spending time with these concert posters gave me insight into the lives and artistic processes of their creators.
Ryan: Other things you are interested to share?
Ellie: The records I created for the psychedelic and Puerto Rican artist posters will eventually be made publicly searchable online! I think there is a lot of research potential in these posters, so I am excited that they will soon be more discoverable.
Learn More:
- Read more about the Library’s Junior Fellows Program, and other internship, fellowship, and volunteer opportunities at the Library of Congress. See other past posts from our “Behind the Scenes” series to learn about our work.
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