Imaging America: Toward a Digital Image Library for American Studies

By Max Marmor

Americanists are increasingly engaged with digital technologies. This engagement ranges widely across a terrain mapped helpfully by the ASA’s excellent Crossroads project: from the routine use of course-based web sites to the elective affinities of electronic discussion groups; from syllabus exchanges to directories of networked professional and information resources; from JSTOR’s invaluable core collection of full-text history journals to the rich corpus of literature in the Making of America collection. In the area of visual and material culture, too, Americanists are better served by networked resources than many colleagues in the humanities and social sciences. The Library of Congress’s American Memory collections have expanded the horizons of the public domain by delivering valuable digital collections to teachers, students, and scholars all across the spectrum, from K-12 to research universities in ways that seek actively to encourage experimentation and innovation through digital technologies. Such related initiatives as the Association of Art Museum Directors’ AMICO Library and the Research Libraries Group’s nascent Cultural Materials Initiative promise variously to provide rich resources for the Americanist. Mention should also be made of the admirable web-publishing efforts of such individual collectors and scholars as David Rumsey, who has made his remarkable private collection of historic America maps freely available over the internet. (For these various initiatives, please see the list of URLs at the end of this article.)

Within this rich landscape, what is arguably lacking are digital imaging initiatives designed and developed expressly to meet the needs of the educational and scholarly communities. Most of the imaging initiatives mentioned above, advanced and shaped by consortia of collecting institutions, understandably take as their point of departure the institutional commitments, constraints, and imperatives of participating members in the library and museum sector. Working within all-too-familiar financial constraints, the digital libraries they are creating consist principally of those materials that can most readily be secured: materials already digitized and cataloged or for which photographic and descriptive documentation lending itself to digital conversion exists; materials that participating institutions need or wish to employ in their own educational, exhibition, outreach, and publication programs. The hope is generally expressed that such an admittedly uncritical, ad hoc approach to digital collection development will ultimately produce a "critical mass" of digital content that will, in an unproved leap from the quantitative to the qualitative, be of significant value to teaching, learning, and scholarship. And yet it is instructive to reflect that the most valuable and successful digital libraries at our disposal JSTOR, for example have been developed in close consultation with an audience of teachers and scholars and hew closely to established if evolving scholarly canons of practice, serviceability, and value.

How can we create digital image libraries that similarly respond from the outset to the observable or expressed needs of educators and scholars? Clearly that is more challenging than selecting core journals in the humanities for digitization: even allowing for the evolution of scholarly publishing and the importance of alternative, peripheral, and short-lived publication venues, evidence of scholarly behavior exists in the domain of periodical literature; this evidence can be verified through the use of such tools as citation indexes; and in short, it is possible to arrive at a reliable sense of which journals have been and remain central to a given scholarly discipline. The situation is clearly and significantly different with images, especially in a field as diverse and, by design, interdisciplinary as American Studies. Confronted with the rich universe of visual materials related to American history and culture in our archives, historical societies, libraries, and museums, how can we decide what will be most valuable to students, teachers, and scholars in digital form? How can digital library planners set intelligent and informed priorities that reflect and respond to your priorities?

That is the challenge the Imaging America initiative seeks to meet. Initiated by the Yale University Library, which is providing the project’s leadership and organizational home during the incubation period, Imaging America is intended ultimately to become an independent, self-sustaining library service to which individuals and institutions will have licensed access on terms that encourage subscription while also helping ensure the sustainability of the service itself. Toward that end, Imaging America seeks to take a strategic approach to building a digital library, along the lines suggested above, in support of the study and teaching of American art, architecture, material and visual culture. Success in this effort will require three things: the creation of a robust and scaleable (extensible) technical capability for developing and distributing a digital image library; commitment to a collection development strategy that responds to widespread and abiding imaging needs in the field of American Studies; and finally, engagement of collecting institutions (of which Yale is of course itself one by virtue of its rich library and museum collections) in a joint effort to create a new and promising digital library responding to the shared educational mission of the participating institutions and the pedagogical and research needs of the American Studies community. Only through an active and sustained collaboration between teaching and collecting institutions can a project like Imaging America succeed. Such a collaboration also promises to help the cultural heritage community arrive at shared understandings in the areas of copyright and the educational use of digital images, understandings that simultaneously respect the interests of collecting institutions while actively fostering education and scholarship.

The technical environment for Imaging America is being created in collaboration with Luna Imaging, Inc. and a group of sister institutions (the Luna Users Group) working with the same vendor. This technology environment includes several key components: the design and construction of a scaleable database of images and associated texts (metadata); the development of curriculum development and presentation software permitting a successful migration from slides to digital images; such related course-support capabilities as image reserves and web-export capability; and finally, the ability to do things with digital images that one could never do within the constraints of slide technology (e.g., preparing presentations remotely over a secure network, delivering a presentation script while reserving the ability spontaneously to deviate from that script as appropriate, making image collections available to students "24x7", "zooming in" on details through the use of new digital compression technologies, etc). Americanists at Yale are just now beginning to test this new approach to teaching with images in the classroom; tandem experiments are being undertaken at collaborating institutions such as Cornell University and Smith College. Simultaneously with this technical implementation, we have begun the process of enlisting the participation of historical associations, libraries, and museums with strong collections of American art and related primary resources.

But the actual development of a digital image library for American Studies requires more than technology and collaborators; it requires, as suggested above, a collection development strategy that responds to genuine and abiding needs in the field. Imaging America aims to be a sustainable service, and in the digital arena sustainability means, among other things, knowing one’s market and securing "market share." But what, to paraphrase Freud, does an Americanist want?

We hope to answer this question by various means, including: learning more, through consultation, questionnaire, and the study of curricula and syllabi, about the uses Americanists presently make of images in their teaching and scholarship; observing acquisitions practices and collecting trends in slide libraries supporting American Studies programs; studying the business practices of slide vendors; and consulting the transaction records of museum rights and reproductions departments. In these and other ways, we hope to define and circumscribe the body of images most frequently employed in teaching American art, architecture, material and visual culture. Success in this effort poses its own dangers, of course, not least among them reifying an existing canon and discouraging innovation and the evolution of new perspectives. And so we have set ourselves the tandem task of accommodating evolving practices in the employment and study of visual materials. We will only succeed in this effort with the help of Americanists, of the ASA, and especially of its fertile Material Culture Caucus and Visual Culture/Art History Caucus. You can help Imaging America steer a prudent path between the Scylla of traditional pedagogies and the Charybdis represented by the unique and irreproducible teaching practices of individual practitioners.

For this reason, we are grateful for this valuable opportunity to place Imaging America "on the screen" of the ASA and its diverse membership. We hope you will help us shape this initiative intelligently, in ways that respond to your needs as students, teachers, curators, and scholars, in all the several venues within which you practice your craft. We’ll be in touch with you through various channels being made available to us through the courtesy of the ASA, and we invite you to be in touch with us directly.

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URLs for web sites cited in this article, in the order cited:

ASA Crossroads site: http://crossroads.georgetown.edu/home.html

JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org

Making of America sites: http://moa.cit.cornell.edu/moa/index.html (Cornell site) or

http://moa.umdl.umich.edu/ (University of Michigan site).

Library of Congress American Memory site: http://memory.loc.gov

Association of Art Museum Directors’ AMICO Library site: http://www.amico.org

Research Libraries Group’s Cultural Materials Initiative site: http://www.rlg.org/culturalres/

David Rumsey (Cartography Associates) site: http://www.davidrumsey.com )

Luna Imaging, Inc.: http://www.luna-imaging.com

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Reprinted from the American Studies Association Newsletter