Among the academic disciplines that naturally rely heavily upon image resources in the classroom is the History of Art. Many pairs of projected slides traditionally accompany lectures in art history courses, and familiarity with the visual examples presented is expected of students when they are tested on the course content. A perennial problem is that usually the slides are only displayed in class for a very short duration.
In most institutions where art history is taught, images are provided in some form for review purposes. Most simply, students may be directed to study the plates in books placed on reserve in the Library. Sometimes photographs and reproductions are posted on walls in hallways or study rooms or set out in boxes for browsing. Another common solution has been to display the slides themselves on light tables or in carrels on viewers that accommodate carousel trays. All of these methods have their limitations, particularly for a large class, such as Brown's introductory course, which has an enrollment of more than 150 students.
Many colleges and universities have experimented with digital solutions to image review, most often with dedicated workstations in a single location. At Brown, a Pilot Project has taken this a step further by providing the students of this year's introductory art history class with images on the World Wide Web (WWW). For several years, the potential uses of digital images have intrigued art historians at Brown as well as elsewhere. Until the appearance of the WWW, however, no easy method existed for delivering the images to a variety of different types of workstations in many locations. The online review designed for Brown takes full advantage of Web features to provide students with images that are organized according to the sequence of lectures and that are conveniently accessible throughout the campus.
Following each lecture, a selection of the most important images is posted to the WWW page for the course. Access to them via Netscape (or another WWW browser that supports online graphics) is possible from most networked workstations at Brown. The images will be accessible only for the duration of the course, and viewing of the images is restricted to the Brown University community. Slide display on a light table continues as an alternative means of review.
Planning for the Pilot Project began in the summer of 1994, as a cooperative venture of the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, the Art Slide Library, the Scholarly Technology Group (STG) of Computing & Information Services, and the Library Systems Office. The Art Slide Library's photographer learned to use a slide scanner at STG's office to digitize slides. Digital images were prepared based on the slides used in the introductory course last year, utilizing several methods in order to compare their cost, quality, and convenience. These included scanning in-house, sending slides out to a commercial lab to be digitized on Photo-CD, which was funded by a Salomon grant, and direct purchase from a vendor.
While our experience thus far favors the use of Photo-CD for its efficiency, scanning of individual images in- house continues as the course progresses. Although the syllabus is not greatly changed, the visual examples chosen to illustrate the course content are not identical to those used in 1994, so several new images must be scanned after each lecture. All the participants in the Pilot Project are committed to keeping the review program flexible enough to accommodate the creativity which characterizes the preparation of lectures, even at the introductory level.The Scholarly Technology Group provides technical support for the project. The design of the course page allows students to call up images in groups by lecture, either labeled with identifications or unlabeled for self-testing. Clicking on a thumbnail image brings up a large image at higher resolution. The quality of the digitized images, however, is sufficient only to jog the memory and is not equivalent to the slide from which it was made. Speed of access to the images was given priority over high resolution. A simple search program is also available that enables the user to call up images by artist, title, date, current location or country of origin. The identifying data with each image was extracted from the Art Slide Library's database.
Evaluation of the Pilot Project will be conducted at the end of the course. A survey of students in the class revealed that 93% preferred the online images to other methods of review. In order to comply with U.S. copyright law, permissions must be obtained before digital images can be used in future offerings of this course. Therefore, access to the Web page for HA/0001 will be terminated in December.