Proposal from:

Samuel J. Pezzillo

Classics

Birmingham-Southern College

(205) 226-4660

spezzill@bsc.edu

Mine is a multi-phased project. I am applying for the Technology Fellows Program in support of the first two phases. I propose to:

1. Digitalize my extensive slide collection of Italy (and a smaller collection of Greece)
2. Assess the reproduction quality of the oldest slides in the collection (the oldest are over 30 years old)
3. Organize the slides and their identification criteria into a database
4. Make the collection available on-line through the BSC library (and assign limited use copyrights to Birmingham-Southern College for this purpose)
5. Over the last three years of my teaching, travel again to Italy to expand the collection and to retake (with digital equipment) those items determined to have lost their quality due to age and the instability of the film media.

I first began travel and study in Italy in 1967. Over the years since, I have traveled there again perhaps some 20 times and am scheduled to travel there at least twice a year for the next two years, perhaps the next three. My photographic record of these trips is now quite extensive. In general, the photographs I took were intended to illustrate courses I was actually teaching or intended to teach.

In the last decade I have moved increasingly to employing the images in various computer presentation formats. Unfortunately I digitalized the images typically only for a specific presentation and did not retain an archival copy. In the early period this was due generally to storage limitations.

As I move closer to retirement myself, I am more conscious of the valuable resource that was lost when the senior professor, who was at Birmingham-Southern when I began my teaching here, died unexpectedly. Since he had no surviving family, most of his "teaching tools" went to another colleague who herself eventually retired, and with her, the extensive slide collection that the senior professor had accumulated over the years. She too has since died. My memory of his collection, having seen it in his home, was that it was organized in carousels and covered one full wall of a library, at least 150 carousels in all. He had lent me a few slides at one point. They were all catalogued in detail. No one now seems to know what became of those slides. By this time (as I see from some of my older ones) they will have gone well past their reproductive prime and would likely be of little use.

I do not want the same thing to happen to my collection. Fortunately the technology is available to preserve their content in a more archival form and to make them available to a broader audience. I have outlined above what I think are the distinct stages in the project. I think the first two phases are achievable in the spring – although some of the later phases are carried out simultaneously.

Since I will be travelling to Italy in January and again in March this year with study tours, I can begin retaking slides which have faded or filling in gaps which the scanning and databasing reveal. The next few years will be a good time to do this since so many of the monuments were restored for Jubilee year and are now in the best shape they will be for next few hundred years. My plans for the two years after that are to travel to Italy with at least the same frequency. This should allow for the expansion of the collection and the "restoration" of faded items. With the current state of equipment and the current range of editing programs, an even more interesting range of image possibilities exists, such as outdoor panoramas and 360 degree images of artifacts.

My past experience with computer based material is that newer equipment and different/better programs tend to outstrip one’s initial intentions. A comment Gregory Crane, master of the Perseus site at Tufts, once made rang very true when I heard it and rings very true now. In effect, he said he was aware, from the beginning of that project, that storing the information in a database was the only way to insure its future utility, the only way to avoid obsolescence by the newer and better "static" programs. I hope in this project to establish at least for our campus the various parameters for the creation of the images and the establishment of an image database. In particular to establish a system that allows for the coordination of the collaborative product of workers with different skill sets required by such projects.

In doing some preliminary study of the technical issues, just with the scanning and archiving, I have realized one doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel, but it is clear that early decisions on how one organizes one’s own project can have important implications. The following two references are a sample starting point.

http://www.panix.com/~squigle/rarin/5imaging.html

http://www.getty.edu/gri/standard/introimages/12-Qual.html

I am aware that many professors on a campus have equally valuable collections for their own fields of study. Many have varying degrees of computer experience. I hope my project can establish for our campus a working model that will allow the least computer literate professor to work with more technological colleagues and students to preserve their equally valuable material. I think the individual campus is the place where this impulse must first develop. I think "the library" is a good medial point from which the cross-cultural product can emerge. It will then be up to "the libraries" to interconnect and make the material available to a broader audience.

I do not think that one large centralized area within the ACS group can be the focus for all similar projects. The classicists of the ACS schools are among the most savvy of computer users; yet this group, for all its good will and energetic leadership, has been unable to really get a similar image database up and running. One of the stumbling blocks is, I think, centralization. "Working locally, but thinking globally," is a possible solution. I think this is particularly true in the potential expansion of the idea for those less technological faculty who would likely be more willing to work with local faculty and students than some distant center. My proposal focuses on the local; the libraries can solve the global issues.

There is another issue involved. At one stage the thought of distributing quality images on the web via a database might have seemed unlikely for a number of reasons, most technological (storage and bandwith), some legal (copyright). But the next stage for the "academic" internet is not texual distribution, but visual distribution. The fact is that sources for images for instruction and other purposes are drying up unless one wants to get them from Corbis and Getty or perhaps a few other places and pay a fee. The alternative is to produce them oneself at great expense or borrow them, even with proper citation, from sources where one is unsure of copyrights. Those who, like me, think that the government granted free internet requires a return sacrifice of "ownership" should find my project appealing. I am willing to give up to my institution and the net some of my ownership of my images for free distribution. I hope that eventually others would be equally willing.

Additional Notes and Technical Comments