| The Office of Visual Materials in the School of Art and Art History maintains a collection of over 360,000 35mm slides and 150,000 online digital images documenting major works in the fields of African, Asian, Islamic, Native American, and Western Art. The School has continuously invested resources into the collection since art classes were first taught at the University of Iowa. In recent years we have been able to add 10,000 new slides to collection each year. The collection is used by faculty in both studio and art history courses.
In October 2000, we developed and implemented a web-based program that combines the data from a relational database with digital image files made from scanning select slides from the collection. This pilot project, the Digital Image Library, was created to assist students with the review of images they viewed in class. The students have overwhelmingly accepted it as an extraordinarily helpful and critical tool in the process of learning visual culture. It has received over 19 million requests for images from University of Iowa students since it went online and the numbers continue to rise dramatically. We also use MDID software to deliver digital images directly to the classroom using dual digital projection.
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