Oregon State University has published more than 300 historic photographs of the Willamette River basin, taken from 1934 to 1945 as part of a comprehensive fish habitat survey. Here's a link to the press release (more).
When you finally get to them, the images are quite striking, like this one of a sawmill dam at the mouth of the Mary's River near Corvallis, taken in 1940. Especially cool is the way in which the entire digital collection is hyper-linked so you can go from this picture to all other pictures on the same river or of the same type of scene (in this case a dam) and chart your own course through this collection.
It's a pity, then, that the front page makes navigation so difficult. Most of the page is a clickable image map of the Willamette River basin. Unfortunately, there is no visual indication which rivers and which parts of rivers are hot linked so I had to resort to carefully tracing the Willamette from Portland south all the way to Corvallis before I found a hotlink. It would be better to include nodes on the river or some form of visual indicators of pictures. Also, I found myself spending a lot of time waiting for tool tips to appear to confirm that the name of a river and -- all too often -- would end up with the generic text string "Willamette Basin Map."
Other browse/search methods are supported, but their design appears to have been targeted primarily to users already familiar with this image collection.
