ACRL Contributed Paper Collaborating to Build Digital Teaching Collections: A Library/IT Partnership

worked with Visual Resource Collection (VRC) staff to coauthor a successful grant proposal to develop a centrally managed, flexible, and sustainable digital asset management (DAM) system for instructional media. At the core of the initiative is a goal to create image collections that are fully integrated into the curriculum, are readily accessible to faculty members and students, and offer the potential for resource-sharing with other institutions. The evolving transition from analog slides and projectors to digital images and display systems is well documented in the library, visual resources, and scholarly art history literature (Bartlett and Roux 2007, Carlson 2005, Durran 1997, Fry 2007). Since access to high-resolution digital media in networked environments became accessible in the nineties, several potential advantages of digital images over analog slides have become evident. These include enhanced viewing capabilities (zooming and panning), easy access to digital images outside of the classroom for simultaneous use by multiple individuals, increased flexibility in the organization and arrangement of image groups, and a wide array of possibilities for annotating images and integrating them with other media to place them within a pedagogical context. As with other new technologies, some individuals responded to digital imagery by opting to stay with analog, whil