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How Does Your Conservatory Grow?   New Life for Smith's Old Houses

Smith's Digital Database: A New Venue for Visuals Although a significant makeover of its Museum of Art, art department and library buildings is under way, Smith has not only maintained a steady, uncompromising delivery of its undergraduate art programs, but also offered continued access to some of its unique resources. One of those, best known to studio art and art history students as Smith's visual resources collection, is now even easier for students and faculty to use. Thanks to an ambitious project undertaken by the college to digitize thousands of its mounted photographs and slide images during a three-year period, students can view about 4,000 online images of the world's great artworks from the Smith collection via any networked computer on campus. This effort -- to create a high-resolution digitized-image computer database -- makes Smith one of the first liberal arts colleges to begin to place all of its visual collections online, says Elisa Lanzi, director of image collections in the art department, who co-directs the project. Larger research institutions, such as Harvard, Cornell, Stanford and Yale universities, have begun similar programs. "Head of a Young Woman" by Federico Barocci, c. 1574, is one of the works from the museum collection now available for study online. So far, the Smith project, funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and a recent $300,000 grant from the Davis Education Foundation, has converted some 10,000 slides and photographs into digital images and placed them in a computer database. The database is stored on a server in the new Visual Communications Resource Center (VCRC), currently housed in Bell Hall at the Clarke School for the Deaf. Eventually the database will hold not only all the 35mm slides, of which there are about 360,000, but also images of some 90,000 medium-format or lantern slides, says Daniel Bridgman, codirector of the project and visual communication specialist in Educational Technology Services, a division of Information Technology Services. By early 2001, he says, about 12,000 images-a combination of teaching materials for the art department and images from the museum collection-should be available online to users everywhere on campus. The database will eventually include images of everything from geological formations to artifacts from the Sophia Smith Collection and books from the Mortimer Rare Book Room. "There is no real limitation to what we can now accomplish with the technology available," Bridgman says. Sharing virtual collections with other educational institutions such as Yale and Cornell universities is also in the plans, he notes. The linking possibilities extend to libraries, archives and museums all over the world, says Bridgman. For example, the Library of Congress already has placed historical letters online and plans to add maps. "We're pretty excited about this," says Bridgman. "It gives people an incredible vista over all these collections which, until now, have not even been searchable."-JME

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Copyright © 2001, Smith College. Portions of this publication may be reproduced with the permission of the Office
of College Relations, Garrison Hall, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts 01063. Last update: 1/25/2001.

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