Meredith Clausen
Art History and Architecture
University of Washington, Seattle Campus

Access to Art

It's exam time. Students are cramming for finals which, in the Art and Architecture programs, is a contact sport. Instructors in the Art and Architecture departments rely heavily on 35 mm slides in their courses to exemplify concepts in action. Professor Meredith Clausen showcased numerous such slides, taken during her own course of study, to provide the visual element so crucial to the content of the Architectural History and American Architecture courses she teaches. Like other instructors in her department, she routinely placed the lecture slides in plastic sleeves after class and posted them in the hallway over a light board for students to review. Slides typically remain posted in the hallway for a day or two after the lecture.

"The problem was, after class students wanted more access to my slides," says Clausen. "Around exam time, you'd see dozens students in the hallway, clawing to see the slides. In 1995, one of my graduate students suggested I put my images on the Web."

Mike Furr, Clausen's graduate student, was to become instrumental in the development and maintenance of the image archive. He scanned her personal collection of 35 mm slides and posted them to a Web site called Ark2 (rechristened the Cities/Buildings Archive), one of the most comprehensive architectural resources on Internet.

A Growing Collection

Professor Clausen set out on a trip to Europe in the summer of 1996 to augment her personal collection of photographs of salient buildings across the continent. A visiting professorship in Tokyo in late 1996 provided Clausen with another opportunity to gather images. Slavic scholar Dan Waugh in the University of Washington History Department has also contributed close to 2000 slides. These images, along with hundreds of others submitted by colleagues

around the globe, have helped the Cities/Buildings Archive to grow to nearly 5000 images. The archive grew large enough that navigating through it in its original state (as series of hierarchical hyperlinks) became very difficult. Another method was needed to facilitate efficient archiving and retrieval of the images. Enter CISO.

Ark2 and CISO, a Collaborative Effort

In 1997, the Center for Information Systems Optimization (CISO) was in the midst of developing a searchable multimedia database and needed a volume of content to test out its wares. Clausen's image archive was just the thing. Plugging the archive into the fledgling CISO software (dubbed 'Content') permits those using the images to search through them by keyword, author, location, or date, as opposed to the more limited access afforded by hyperlinks on the Ark2 Web site. Although not yet ready for prime time release, the Cities/Buildings Archive can be viewed and searched via the Content Database.

Diverse Uses

Although originally conceived to offer students better access to course material, Professor Clausen regularly receives emails from people making innovative use of the archive. An elementary school teacher recently wrote to describe a project she worked on with her students, accessing the photos from the former Yugoslavia in an effort to give her students a more human perspective of the crisis in that region. Another project here at the University of Washington is the brainchild of undergraduate Mary Gates scholar Amy Frerker, who is adding audio descriptions of the images in the Content-based version of the archive, in order to provide the blind with a sense of the structures.

While remarkably broad in its holdings already, the Cities/Buildings Archive team hopes to expand its holdings in several other specialized areas including Native American, Islamic, Thai, and African architecture. Clausen also hopes to increase the archive's usefulness as a tool in historic preservation, with images of buildings taken under construction or before deterioration, demolition, remodeling, or restoration.

If you have images you would like to submit for addition to the Ark2 collection, please send email to Meredith Clausen.

by Holly Jamesen, August 1999