This session considers two large commercial photographs collections in the Georgia State University Library that were acquired as a corporate archives, arranged and preserved in an archival manner, and accessed using traditional archival access tools. When the Library acquired CONTENTdm in 2009, the conceptual approach to the collections had to change: the photographs collections are now being considered as assemblages of items and small series. As the demand for creating item-level metadata developed, so too did the possibility of using the collections as the basis of a research project rather than illustrations of research already compiled. Three presentations consider the (1)acquisition, history and preservation of the collections; (2) shift in thinking of the collections as archives to collections of images; and (3) the use of the images as research resource. Specifically, the presentations are titled, "From Office Records to Archives" (Roberts), "From Archives to Image" (Hardesty), "From Image to Idea" (Zietz).