The popularity of the Civil War as a topic of research is increasing each year, and will undoubtedly continue to do so.

The American Civil War continues to hold the attention of both historians and the general public. One needs only to consider the critical acclaim and viewer popularity of "The Civil War" which aired on public television in September 1990 to verify the war's continuing appeal (Rother, 1991, 2).

In order to best meet the needs of the users of this index, a chart of user requests for items from the entire photograph collection was generated. This chart characterizes requests by subject and level of specificity. This data was then incorporated into the design of a prototype bibliographic record for the photographs in the collection.

A representative sample of records was generated and combined to produce a model full-text searchable index in ZyIMAGE system currently in place at the Ohio Historical Society. Each data file is treated as an individual document by the index, so the researcher is shown one discrete record for each image in the database. Reference staff members were invited to test and offer criticism of this prototype index. They were asked to browse the index, locate individual known images, and to request groupings of images of their own choosing. The goal of this research was to create a searchable index that is as intuitive and useful as possible for all current and future user groups.