As a part of their daily classwork, students in the School of Architecture need to view and review buildings, public spaces, and landscapes all over the world. Since the students can't visit all of these sites in person, the Architecture program has relied on photographs and slides for many years. Its Visual Resources Collection contains more than 300,000 slides (plus a few videos) for use by faculty and students in the School.

In the last few years, with the help of the Office of Information Technology (OIT), the Visual Resources Collection has been digitizing these images and storing them on CDs. The digital images may then be viewed by students, in lieu of the physical originals, with fewer time and resource constraints. The digital versions may also be uploaded to a server, integrated into the library's database records, or put online for easier access.

"This is advantageous for a number of reasons," according to Cynthia Frank, Curator of Slides. "Students won't be limited to Slide Room hours, the slides themselves can be put back in the collection, so other faculty and students may use them, and there is less risk of damage to the original slides."

Images are scanned at a high resolution and burned onto Kodak Photo CDs. With the help of the Caprina project at OIT, the Visual Resources Collection was able to process the first 10 CDs, containing approximately 1,000 images. Further CDs have followed, so that the total number of digitized images on CD is now in the neighborhood of 4,500.

One of the classes for which a large number of slides are being digitized is ARCH 654: Theories of Urban Development and Design, taught by Professor Karl DuPuy. Julie Pelletier, the Graduate Assistant who has been doing web development for 654, describes the class as "extremely image intensive. Professor DuPuy packs as much into three hours a week as he possibly can, and this one-semester course alone consists of about 3,000 slides. We're hoping to have all the images for the course online by the start of the fall semester, and it is our hope that students will refer to the web site to refresh their notes, study for exams, do research for other classes, etc."

Small thumbnails of each digitized image are embedded in the Visual Resources Collection's Filemaker Pro database, so that the catalog record for each slide will actually include a small image of the slide itself when a student, faculty member, or curator accesses it.

Slightly larger, intermediate size versions of each image are stored on the Caprina server at OIT. These can be linked to web pages for general access or for the online use of students in a particular class in the School, such as ARCH 654. The full-size digital images are available on the Photo CDs, which are stored in the Slide Room itself.

"Ellen Borkowski at OIT has put all the images on the web for us and been very patient in answering all our technical questions," Pelletier says. "In general, [digitizing slides for ARCH 654] has been a great learning experience. We really hope the students will use the site and get the benefit from it that we are anticipating. We'll know more in the fall once we start getting some feedback."

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