The Herbert Sondheim, Inc. scrapbooks in the New School Archives and Special Collections document the activities of a notable early to mid-20th-century New York-based manufacturer of ready-to-wear women's fashions. A precursor to the contemporary fast fashion industry, Sondheim's employees sketched and kept detailed notes on materials and construction of garments produced by Parisian designers, which the firm then adapted into more affordable and easily obtainable apparel for American consumers. A retrospective visual materials cataloguing project resulting from a graduate student's interest in the collection led to the online availability of over 1200 sketches of fashion adaptations and challenged archives staff to develop appropriate descriptive metadata for a fragmented, ambiguous and complex documentary record.