Project Number 27 – 1993

Caprina: Wide Access to Digitized Images for Education

Project Number 27 – 1993

Abstract

The ultimate goal of the Caprina project is to improve education, research, and community service by providing ready access to large collections and a wide variety of digitized high-quality images via the Campus optical-fiber-based network. By using a collaboration between the Campus CARL (network-accessible) library system and dedicated images servers on the network, images will be available on thousands of computers both on and off Campus.

In addition to facilitating access to images by their traditional users, wide-ranging image accessibility will be enhanced with an extended searching capability so that the images are usable in ways limited only people’s imaginations.

The beginning stages of the project are already yielding unanticipated benefits. The large number of students in disciplines such as Art History and Architecture has usually precluded their access to departmental slide libraries for review of images seen in class. In turn, instructors have restricted their syllibi. Now faculty are unrestricted in their choices of images since they are all available on the network.

Student access to images is via several locally-written programs. One presents the student with the bibliographic citations of the images in the order in which they appeared in class. Clicking on a citation produces the image. Multiple images can be displayed simultaneously. A flash-card program presents students with sets of images in a random order.