September 27, 2007
Need a photo? Try the UW Image Bank
A small grant made in 2004 to facilitate groundbreaking discussions and works across disciplines supported a three-campus, five-department project to create an online resource of high-quality images in the fields of art, architecture, history and culture.
The UW Image Bank, http://imagebank.washington.edu/, is an online database containing about 6,000 images. Most of the photos were purchased outright from private companies, Scholars Resource, Art on File and other vendors. “Buying from these sources gave us better digital quality than if we had tried to rely solely on digitizing images from UW departmental collections,” says Denise Hattwig, curator of visual resources at UW Bothell, who coordinated the project. Her team included visual resources curators, librarians and faculty. All photos on the site are free for educational uses.
The project was supported by the Fund for Innovation and Redesign, which made its awards in 2004 to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration, for projects that would average less than $100,000 in total expenditures. The UW Libraries hosts the database and provides technical support for the collaboration.
“Our goal was to start with a core collection that would be of broad use across the University,” Hattwig says. “We left the question of resources to serve individual courses to departments, which certainly can augment the collection.”
Over time, local collections that exist on slides will be added to the Image Bank. The collection has many search options, which were created by UW librarians as they catalogued the collection. There is also a special feature that helps to bring the images into PowerPoint presentations.
The Image Bank is becoming a portal for access to a variety of image databases to which the UW Libraries has subscribed. The site currently has links to the immense collections of Corbis, CAMIO, AP Images, as well as the UW Libraries Digital Collections.
Collaborators on the project include UW Libraries and the Visual Resources collections of the School of Art, the College of Architecture and Urban Planning, UW Bothell and UW Tacoma.
“The Image Bank is a great alternative to online searches, with better quality and no questions about copyright,” Hattwig says.
