JUSTIN CHEN/YH

The digital future of Yale's art media

The sheer volume of art-related media here at Yale is staggering-with a collection of approximately 325,000 slides and 185,000 mounted photographs, one is led to wonder just how accessible or even necessary these resources could possibly be. Chances are that the average Yalie has little or no idea where the slides and photographs, which are in fact crucial to Yale's renowned art and art history programs, are located.

According to Max Marmor, head of the Yale Arts Library, "The Yale Library has historically supported the use of images in teaching and learning at Yale, including the classroom use of images, through its Visual Resources Collection (VRC)." Formerly known as the Slides and Photographs Collection, the VRC is a department of the Yale Arts Library and is located in Street Hall on Old Campus.

With such an enormous collection of slides and photographs, it is not difficult to imagine that the upkeep and cataloguing processes are daunting for the VRC. In addition, having all the art media centralized in one building vastly reduces accessibility. In the spirit of the information age, the Yale library is now attempting to combat these limitations by converting its analog image collection-that is, physical slides and photographs-to digital format. According to Marmor, "Access, or ubiquity, is a big piece of this [project]: instead of having an image library that resides in a particular facility on campus, we wish to make our image resources available wherever Yale students, staff and faculty need to consult them."

Digitizing Yale's art media has significant benefits in terms of infrastructure and maintenance. Marmor noted, "We also hope to contain the cost of building and maintaining our facility by reducing our investment over the long term in physical, or analog, collections of images." He added, "By investing in digital technologies we think we can ultimately save on our investment in physical space."

In fact, the shift from analog to digital images is just one part of a much larger plan for a new Arts library at Yale. Nor is the Arts library alone in its endeavors. The enormous benefits of online images for art classes and museums around the world have led other institutions to take interest in the digitalization process here at Yale.

A major initiative that Yale is spearheading is called "Imaging America" (IA), which, according to Marmor, "has as its primary goal the creation of a scale-able library of digital images supporting American Studies. Marmor, the project director, described IA as "a multi-institutional initiative launched in April 1999" which will serve as "a prototype for a digital image library that will compare favorably in scope with the existing Visual Resources Collection." The site itself states, "Among the principal goals of Imaging America is exploring the ramifications of digital technologies for the teaching of art history and related disciplines, and the opportunities these technologies offer to enhance teaching and scholarship." Although specific institutions were not mentioned, according to the site the Yale library is leading the IA project, with contributions from the Beinecke Library and the Yale University Art Gallery, but also from "selected museums, historical societies, and industry partners."

Still another project in which Yale's Arts library is intimately involved is the "Academic Image Cooperative" (AIC), which is sponsored in part by the Digital Library Federation and the College Art Association. Marmor describes the AIC as "a project intended to foster the ability of scholars, librarians, photographers, and visual resource curators to build a web-based image repository for purposes of education and scholarship that will be relatively unconstrained by copyright considerations."

The AIC's technical infrastructure is currently being developed at Carnegie Mellon University using the XML programming language. The members of the AIC hope to have a prototype by this February to be presented at the College Art Association conference in New York City later that month.

In attempting to digitalize art slides and photographs, the Arts library team has encountered the relatively nebulous and undefined question of copyrighting and intellectual property. According to Marmor, "There is no robust marketplace for the acquisition of digital images of cultural materials, as there is for slides and photographs; there is little legislative guidance concerning the creation and distribution of such images; and there is much to learn about technical and metadata standards, infrastructure needs, software tools for the use of digital images, etc. The Yale library is playing a leading role in trying to sort out these issues."

Fortunately for Yale students, the Arts Library's efforts are not merely directed outward. In fact, the library has been engaged in a partnership with Luna Imaging Inc., for the past six months to create what Marmor described as "a front end software for image database management and delivery." Currently the software, called "Insight," has a teaching module that can be used classroom presentation and teaching purposes. However, the ultimate goal of Insight according to Marmor is "to create a genuine image library that can be used by the entire Yale community, and perhaps others under the right conditions, for scholarship as well as teaching." Marmor qualified his statement by noting, "How widely images will be made available will be driven by copyright and intellectual property issues."

So far, the digital images of the VRC haven't made an enormous impact on the student community. However, once the presentation tools being engineered by Luna Imaging Inc. are complete and the catalogue of images is in place, the incredible efforts of Marmor and the rest of the Yale library staff involved in the project will almost certainly pay off. Shannon Dunlap, Br '01, an art student, agrees that having the images online will be a great help, at least in part because she will no longer have to go to Street Hall to view slides or photographs. Although some art professors would argue that the visual effect of a physical slide is different from and cannot be replaced by a digital, online slide, Dunlap disagrees. She stated simply, "Seeing a slide is seeing it."

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