The Collection Guide: https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/findingaids/gamblesidney/
The Digital Collection: https://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/gamble/
The collection includes: 4700 black/white nitrite negatives; 600 hand-colored lantern slides; an album with 120 images.
About fifteen years after Sidney Gamble’s death (in 1968), his daughter, Catherine Curran, found a trove of nitrate negatives in a closet in the family’s home in New York. Stored in beautiful rosewood boxes, the negatives were housed in individual paper sleeves, annotated with typed and handwritten captions. In order to better preserve them, Ms. Currant hired an archivist, who transferred the negatives into archival sleeves and transcribed the captions onto typed labels. In addition, Ms. Curran made contact sheets of all the negatives in the order in which they were found. She used these contact prints to create ten photograph albums to serve as a reference for the negative collection. In 1986, Catherine Curran established the Sidney D. Gamble Foundation for China Studies to provide for preservation and access to the photographs. A review of the first exhibit catalog prompted the Duke University Libraries’ visual materials archivist to invite Ms. Curran to place Sidney Gamble’s photographs in the Libraries’ Archive of Documentary Arts. An agreement to bring the Gamble collection to Duke was signed in March 2006.
Duke University Libraries contracted with Chicago Albumen Works in Massachusetts to digitize the highly flammable nitrate negatives. Digitization of the Gamble collection began in October 2006 and continued through the spring of 2007. In addition to the photographs, the vendor also digitized the typed image labels to transform the labels into raw texts. This text became the foundation for the image captions and geographic headings in the Sidney D. Gamble Photographs digital collection. In early 2008, Duke University Libraries’ Digital Collections staff updated the geographic names in the labels to Library of Congress Subject Headings formats, added province names to the metadata, and standardized the descriptions to support searching and browsing. The complete collection was published in fall 2008 and is available online at http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/gamble/.
西德尼·戴维·甘博（1890-1968）是社会经济学家，人道主义者和摄影家。甘博出生在美国的俄亥俄州，其祖父詹姆斯·甘博（James Gamble,1803-1891）是宝洁公司的创始人之一。西德尼·甘博1908年随父母第一次来到中国的杭州旅行，为中国的古老文化着迷，也为她的贫穷感到震惊。甘博普林斯顿大学毕业后，在加州大学伯克利分校获得了社会经济学硕士。随后，他三次来到中国，分别是1917—1919年、1924年—1927年以及1931年—1932年。甘博以自愿者的身份，先后任北京基督教青年会和中国平民教育运动的社会调查干事，并就职燕京大学基金会。 甘博在1921年出版的《北京的社会调查》和1926出版的《二十五年来北京之物价工资及生活程度》等，最早用社会调查的方法对北京社会生活各方面进行了梳理，至今仍然是研究那个时期北京社会的重要参考资料。
甘博也是一位出色的业余摄影师。他在1908-1932间拍摄的中国各地的照片，包括有5000幅左右的黑白照片，为民国初年的中国社会建立起了一套丰富的图像档案。1984年，甘博去世十五年以后，他的女儿凯瑟琳·科伦夫人，机缘巧合在家里的阁楼里发现了这些保存完整的照片。1986年科伦夫人成立了西德尼·D·甘博中国研究基金会致力于照片的保存与推广。杜克大学图书馆于2006和科伦夫人签署了正式的收藏协议，让这些照片最终落户在杜克大学的鲁宾斯坦图书馆。
被重新发现的甘博的这些照片只有底片，存放在漂亮的紫檀木箱子里。底片是那种高度易燃的硝酸胶片。科伦夫人雇佣了一名专业的档案管理员将这些底片从箱子里取出，装进专门的档案袋里，并将甘博手写的有关每幅照片的信息，打印整齐贴在每个档案袋上。杜克大学图书馆2006年3月与科伦夫人签署协议后，就着手准备这些底片的数字化。考虑到底片的高度易燃性，图书馆将底片数字化委托给麻省的一家公司（Chicago Albumen Works）。当年的10月，底片由科伦夫人处直接运去麻省进行数字化，公司还将打印出的有关照片信息的小条也进行了扫描。这些小条经过光标字符识别后，就成为建立数字库元数据的重要依据。 底片的数字化到2007年春全部完成。全部底片随后运回杜克大学永久保存。图书馆随后开始甘博照片数据库的筹划。整个数据库在2008年秋初步完成，向公众开放。这是甘博照片首次完整地向公众展示。http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/gamble/
