• Project Background
  
• Duke University Special Collections Library and DIAP
  
• Technical Information
  

Project Background

In the spring of 1993 the Duke University Special Collections Library responded to a Request for Proposal issued by the Research Libraries Group for a "Digital Image Access Project" (or DIAP).  This project, which had been organized by RLG's Photograph Preservation Task Force, was designed to "explore issues involved in using digital image access systems to both manage and improve access to photograph collections."

The specific objectives of the project were threefold:

• Explore access and description issues for digital photographic images
• Explore intellectual control as well as collections and resource management issues
• Develop guidelines and models that will assist research institutions in developing local imaging projects.

Institutions selected for participation in this project included:

• The Amon Carter Museum, using images from the Karl Struss archive focusing on photographs taken in New York City between 1908 and 1917.
• The Avery Library at Columbia University, using images from the Empire State Building archive, photographs from several Columbia faculty members, including sociologist Camilo Vergara's "New American Ghetto," images of the cathedral at Amiens, and architectural drawings from the AVIADOR project.
• The Duke University Special Collections Library, using images focusing on cities and towns of the Southeast, documentary photography, and architectural picture postcards.
• The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, using images from the Max Hutzel survey of regional Italian architecture.
• The Francis Loeb Library of Harvard's Graduate School of Design, using images from the library's city planning collections.
• The New York Public Library, using master photographs from the Ramona Javitz collections, including urban subjects taken by Dorothea Lange, Bernice Abbott, Walker Evans, and Lewis Hine.
• Northwestern University, using images from a collection documenting the destruction of Paris during the seige and Commune of 1870-1871.
• The University of California at Berkeley, using images from a variety of collections depicting San Francisco from the 1850s through the 1920s.
• The Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, contributing images from its Civil War and Jack Delano collections.

Duke University Special Collections Library and DIAP

The Special Collections Library contributed 1000 photographs from various collections for the RLG Digital Image Access Project.  Focusing on the "Urban Landscape" theme, items were selected from fourteen separate collections in seven general subject groups.  These groups included:

• Images focused on older photographs of cities and town in the South.  Drawn from several collections, including the Library's general "Picture File" and the papers of the Francis Warrenton Dawson family, it included a large group of contemporary photographs of the 1886 earthquake in Charleston, S.C.; late 19th and early 20th century scenes of life and architecture in Savannah, Ga.; and scenes of early 20th century small town life in and around Cheraw, S.C.
• Images of street scenes, life, architecture, etc., in Durham, N.C., from the turn of the century to ca. 1950.  The photographs were drawn from the papers of Wyatt Dixon (many of which were taken for the Durham Herald-Sun newspaper), the Durham Chamber of Commerce, and Alvin Parnell.
• Photographs from the papers of Frank Cousins (b. 1851), many of them artistically and photograhically exquisite, of street scenes and exterior and interior architecture in Salem, Mass.
• Aerial photographs of towns in Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina made in 1918 by the Aviation Section of the U.S. Army Signal Corps.  These photographs were selected from an album in the collections of the Special Collections Library.
• Photographs (ca. 1899-1902) of cities and towns in the Philippines and Far East drawn from several albums in the custody of the Special Collections Library.
• Modern documentary photographs drawn from the Library's collection of the papers of William Gedney (1932-1989), including photographs from Gedney's "New York," "San Francisco," "Benares, India," and "Night" series.  Also included here are photographs and descriptive text from Duke University undergraduate student projects done for class work under the auspices of the Center for Documentary Studies.  Many of these student projects are focused on life in and around Durham, N.C.
• Picture postcards depicting cities and towns throughout the American South at various times from the turn of the century to the 1960s.

The Special Collections Library's implementation of EAD is maintained via DynaText and DynaWeb software, which the Library acquired through a special educational grant program from Inso Corporation.  All of the Library's encoded finding aids are located at the Digital Scriptorium's DynaWeb Internet Server.  This server (which is still under development) and the software which supports it allows for detailed searching of all the DIAP image collections.  Searches may be made across all collections, limited to only DIAP collections, or limited on the basis of any of the structured information in the descriptions (e.g., main entry/creator, title, subject access terms, captions, etc.).  In addition, all collection descriptions (or any specified subset thereof) may be searched through an open free text search.  For further instructions on searching, see Dynaweb Searching.

Technical Information

The DIAP images were created by Stokes Imaging Service (now JJT, Inc.) of Austin, Texas. The images presented here are 72dpi JPEGs. Thumbnails were created at the Special Collections Library's Digital Scriptorium using ImageMagick for UNIX.

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