Index to Photographs Relating to Disasters and Emergency Management Programs, Activities, and Officials

The agency developed this index to provide its headquarters and field offices, other government agencies, media organizations, and the general public with efficient electronic access to the headquarters compilation of images originating in digital form, and scanned versions of film-based images, on disaster history and the agency mission. The index was designed to furnish intellectual access to the images through its informational content.

This series consists of an electronic index encomp assing item level identification and descriptive data for the 8,751 images in the headquarters digital photographic series. Information is organized in 13 fields, although there is not always data in every field for every image. Among the fields pivotal for citation and searching purposes are: the headquarters assigned image identification ("ID") number; the original file name accompanying the image when it was submitted to headquarters; the narrative caption developed by the photographer in conjunction with headquarters reviewers; the state, territory, or, in a very few cases, foreign country where the image was taken ("Location"); the date when the photograph was originally captured ("Date Taken"); the name of the photographer; the agency-wide disaster designation number, where applicable, for the event photographed; and the classification term or phrase ("Category") applied to the image subject - matter.There are more than two dozen "Category" types represented, from the many kinds of natural disasters (e.g., flood, tornado, typhoon), to man-made disasters (e.g., terrorist attack), to agency program subjects (e.g., special event, training).