Source overview: "Views of Sakhalin Island" and "Ainu Komonjo"

I've randomly come across two extremely useful online archives. The first is the "Views of Sakhalin Island" collection online at the Collections from the National Library of Russia: Prints and Photographs website and the second is Ainu Komonjo at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The "Views of Sakhalin Island" collection consists of early Russian photographs of Sakhalin (Karafuto) with some shots of Aboriginal people including Ainu. These shots seem more ethnographic in nature: basically head shots which were likely used by the Russian Imperial government to catalogue groups being colonized. In addition to photos of these colonized groups, of early colonial architecture, and of Russian laborers (who at this time were likely to have been exiles, political prisoners, and convicts), there are some stunning photographs of Ainu.

While it's hard to extrapolate any sort of narrative description from this collection, it's certainly illustrative of the Russian colonial project as it existed in the 1890s. This was a 30 year period between the Treaty of St. Petersburg in 1875 and the Treaty of Portsmouth in 1905 when Russia had total control over the island. When Japan formally withdrew their claim in 1875, they had ethnically cleansed most of the Ainu from Sakhalin and forcibly moved them to Hokkaido, so it's interesting to see photos such of this of Sakhalin Ainu man wearing what appears to be traditional Ainu clothing. If I focus on Sakhalin/Karafuto, it would be very interesting to find some descriptions of Ainu life on Sakhalin during the period of exclusive Russian control.

The second collection, the Ainu Komonjo, is a huge online archive of Japanese writings on the Ainu across Hokkaido, the Kuriles, and Sakhalin in the 18th-19th centuries which had previously been in the private collection of Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney. Many of the later works are reports made of the Ainu for the Japanese government which sometimes took the form of journals or travelogues. The scans are not particularly high resolution, but are very readable, and this archive makes a fantastic addition to the resources I've collected so far.