Archiving Architectural Images on the Web


Meredith Clausen

When UW architectural history professor Meredith Clausen was asked to teach a lower-division survey course in 1996, she bought herself a ticket to Europe. Six weeks and 2,000 photographs later, she returned and worked with graduate student Michael Furr to put her images on the Web for students to view.

"If you have 200 students in a lecture class, how do you make slides available? That was the main impetus for the Cities and Buildings Database," says Clausen. "And we didn't limit it to UW students. When I taught in Tokyo, I didn't have to cart my slides because they could be accessed on the Web."

For a field assignment, students visit a local church and then study the architect's construction photos, original sketches, and site plans in the online archive.

"How often do students have access to architects' conceptual drawings when they are writing course papers?" asks Clausen. "This is the kind of thing I never anticipated when we started."

UW Digital Collections

Accessing online archives--digital collections--is one way that 61% of instructors responding to the Faculty Survey on Instructional Technology said they would like to use the Web (see box in previous article). The UW Libraries currently has digital collections in a number of disciplines that teachers and students can quickly and conveniently search.

In 1999, with help of the Digital Libraries Initiative Program, a new search engine was adopted for the Cities and Buildings image collection (content.lib.washington.edu/cities/). Educators and scholars from Australia, China, the U.S., and other countries have been beating on the Cities and Buildings digital door some 15,000 times a month.

"It's one of the two top-visited sites of the UW Libraries Digital Collections, and one of the largest collections of architectural images on the Web," reports Kody Janney, coordinator of the UW Digital Initiatives Program.


	This photo of madreses in Samarkand, Uzbekistan is one of UW professor Daniel Waugh's contribution to the Cities and Buildings digital archive.

A Resource for Faculty

Colleagues, architects, and photographers from around the world have contributed to the collection, now totaling over 7,000 images. Associate professor of history Daniel Waugh is the largest contributor after Clausen's 4,000 images. Some 2,000 of Waugh's slides of Russia, Uzbekistan, Yugoslavia, Pakistan, China, India, and other Central Asia countries are included. He points students in his HIST 225 class "The Silk Road" to the database for background, and has also been involved in the technical side including doing some of the scanning himself.

Nicholas Halmi, assistant professor of English who teaches courses in 19th century romanticism that include the architecture of the time, recently asked Clausen about putting his photographs of Karl Schinkel's work into the database to make them easily available to his students.

"I want to get some slides of the Great Buddha and am actively looking for images of places like Afghanistan," says Clausen. "Older photographs of these disappearing sites are invaluable to scholars all over the world."

University of Washington Computing & Communications
Windows on Technology, No. 26, January 2002
newsltr@cac.washington.edu