Why Make Images Available Online

Abstract

Imagine you are an architectural historian located in New York City doing research on the Empire State Building. You are particularly interested in finding pictures of the building and its immediate surroundings in the early part of the 20th century. You decide to visit your favorite research institution, the New York Public Library, to investigate possible sources of information. A librarian sends you to the Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs, where you begin your search for images. Your research indicates that the Avery Library at Columbia University has an Empire State Building archive and that the photographer Karl Struss, whose collection is at the Amon Carter Museum, also photographed New York City between 1908 and 1917, and therefore might be a resource for pertinent images for your study. Discussion with the division librarian leads you to an online resource located in the department, the Digital Image Access Project online database, containing the images and records from photographic collections from nine institutions across the country. You sit down at the designated terminal and, after searching simultaneously across all nine databases using the term Empire State Building, you cull a series of small images which display together on your screen. You select six of these images to enlarge and further study on the screen before you decide to request photographic copies of three images: two from the Avery Library collection and one from the Struss collection. You decide to download the three images to some floppy disks so that you can study them further at home, noting as you do the copyright restrictions on the images. You then speak to the librarian about contacting the two institutions to arrange for 8' × 10 photographs to be made. Your work complete, you gather up your things and prepare to leave. The entire process has taken you about an hour and a half. The Research Libraries Group Digital Image Access Project (DIAP), which has been the focus of our efforts over the past year and a half, had as its central goal the exploration of the capabilities of digital image technology for providing effective access to photographic materials. Photographic materials, which are a subset of a broader class of visual materials that includes slides, drawings, paintings, maps, plans, posters, and all manner of two-dimensional visual works, can be scattered within any given collection or across collections, may be voluminous in size, fragile in form, and are generally difficult to manage and handle. Digitization of these unique visual resources can provide users of our collections unprecedented access to these materials in an effective, efficient manner while preserving the artifactual integrity of the individual items. I will talk today about the user perspective on digitizing visual materials: what are the benefits for the users of our collections, and how does digitization enrich the scholarly and nonscholarly community of users?.