Digital technology creates unprecedented opportunities to make these artistic resources more accessible and usable as tools for scholarship and instruction. It's not an easy transition - digitizing tens or hundreds of thousands of slides, documents and artifacts, making them easily findable, and facilitating their instructional use represent formidable challenges not faced by initiatives to digitize text. But, as efforts to digitize and aggregate images from UC collections move forward, the prospect of giving more people access to a greater number of visual resources ensures that museum curators, collections managers, and information scientists will continue to blaze a trail toward digitization - despite the inevitable bumps along the way.

"We've been on this wonderful journey to bring together digital content, and now we need to step back and ask some critical questions," says Robin Chandler, manager of the Online Archive of California (www.oac.cdlib.org), a digital information resource providing access to materials such as manuscripts, photographs, and works of art held in UC libraries, museums and archives, as well as in other institutions across California. "After digitizing images and putting them out there, the next step is to ask, 'Have we put up the right stuff, and is it easy to use?'" It might seem that these questions should have been asked earlier, Chandler acknowledges, but it's difficult to address such issues in the abstract. "You need something there for people to look at, and experiment with, before you can take it to the next stage."

The OAC, a core component of the California Digital Library (www.cdlib.org), was launched in 1996 to develop "finding aids" for locating primary sources and their digital facsimiles in special collections and libraries in the UC system, and soon expanded to also include collections held by other institutions. Approximately 75 partners across the state now contribute, Chandler says, though the strong UC focus endures. The finding aids - there are now more than 7,300 covering unique collections of papers tracing the history of organizations such as the Sierra Club, the writings of important authors such as John Steinbeck, and many more - provide inventories of the collections, describing and analyzing the contents of individual items. "As the project developed, people were quick to realize that we could begin to digitize some of the contents in those collections and put them online, associated with the finding aids," Chandler notes.

That idea has been further expanded recently as the OAC has moved toward adding museum art and artifacts. "Those of us who manage the content tend to make a distinction between museum and library content, but for the user in an online environment, it's just more interesting material," Chandler says. "You can, for instance, digitize an image of a Miwok basket, then associate that with a digitized map from the Spanish land grant related to where that Indian village was located." With such benefits in mind, Museums and the Online Archive of California (MOAC) was developed as a series of projects enabling museums to participate in the OAC, and has received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Endowment for the Arts.

This has substantially widened the potential audience for fragile artifacts that might have previously been viewed only by a small group of visiting scholars - materials such as the Patrick Breen diary, the manuscript by a surviving member of the Donner party that was trapped in the Sierras in the winter of 1846, which is housed at UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library; the papers of artist Estelle Ishigo, who documented her life in a World War II Japanese internment camp with watercolor and pencil sketches now held in UCLA's Department of Special Collections; or the architectural drawings, also held at the Bancroft Library, of Julia Morgan, whose credits include the Hearst Castle.

"These are unique materials, not the kinds of items that circulate," Chandler says. "By making electronic representations of them and allowing them to be accessible within the UC community and beyond, we're serving the university's instructional mission."

Similar thinking prompted the Library of UC Images (LUCI) project (vrc.ucr.edu/luci/LUCi.html), established in 1997 as an intercampus searchable digital-image databank for such educational uses as image study and research, instructional tutorials, classroom projection, and online catalogues.

The visual resources collections on eight of the UC campuses (UCSF and Merced do not have such collections) currently archive more than three million analog images in libraries, departments, and schools from the fields of architecture, the arts, and humanities. LUCI showcases an eclectic sampling of UC holdings, with images of ancient Greek and Roman archaeology, architecture, and art; California architecture, gardens, murals, and public art; and UC architecture, public art, and the work of artists teaching on the various campuses. Software connects textual data with high-resolution images to build a system that can be used for both research and teaching. (To ensure compliance with U.S. copyright law, access is given outside the UC system only to low-resolution versions of the images.)

By bringing together disparate image assets from UC campuses, LUCI has sought to take advantage of the technology's potential to share dispersed collections, reduce redundancy, energize teaching, and stimulate learning, says Maureen Burns, humanities curator for the Visual Resources Collection at UC Irvine. "Each campus has built image collections that, together, consist of a lot of redundancies - everyone has copies of the Mona Lisa, for example," she says. "At the same time, there are specialized collections driven by faculty members' research interests - for example, an art historian at UC Irvine is a modernist interested in Japan from the late 19th and early 20th century, whereas his counterparts on other UC campuses might focus on historical periods of the more distant past. In that sense, this is a way of sharing the wealth across the campuses. Finding ways to get this rich contextual mass into central image databases or supported in more spontaneous ways at the local level is the challenge."

So far, though, the level of classroom use of LUCI has been lower than its creators had hoped. "We need to work toward making this seamless, an easy thing to bring into the classroom," Burns says. "If it's not a lot of extra work for faculty and they can access everything they need right there in the classroom, they will use it." Currently, though, hurdles include a lack of technological readiness - many classrooms aren't wired for Internet use - and the fact that, with approximately 4,500 digital images from a variety of works, LUCI falls short of the contextual and critical mass needed to teach subjects such as art or architectural history. But Burns expects that to change; she is currently working with the California Digital Library to move LUCI into an expanded database with a large number of other digital image materials. (See related article: Perspective: Daniel Greenstein, Director of the California Digital Library, On Educational Potential of Digital Collections )

Another digitization initiative is under way at UC San Diego, where the substantial, broad-based, catalogued collection of high-quality slides from the Art & Architecture Library (http://roger.ucsd.edu/search~S4) drew the attention of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which is incorporating many of the slides into the image gallery for ARTstor (www.artstor.org), a national project to develop, store, and electronically distribute digital images and related scholarly materials to enrich education in art, architecture, and other humanities fields.

As part of the project, much of the library's slide collection will be digitized and the high-quality images, combined with other learning resources, will be made accessible to students with access to the database via campus networks. The UCSD Libraries have also partnered with libraries at Harvard University and the Cleveland Museum of Art to create a prototype Union Catalog for Art Images (http://gort.ucsd.edu/ucai/), bringing together approximately 500,000 metadata records describing art works and other images created at the three institutions.

"The idea that multiple people can work with the same image rather than having to check a slide out one person at a time is very liberating to faculty," says Vickie O'Riordan, visual resources curator for the UCSD Art & Architecture Library. "But more than just displaying a slide on a screen, art historians will be able to zoom in, showing precise canvas work, brush strokes and all of the things art historians care about. Faculty who work with maps or other media will be able to manipulate them far better than they can now, when they can only show a 35-millimeter slide. And soon, people who want to combine these with audio and moving images will be able to do so."

Nonetheless, O'Riordan doesn't see slides disappearing any time soon. "It's going to take awhile for all of us to get into the mind-set of going pure digital," she says. "Some faculty are ready to jump in, but others are more hesitant. There are still technological concerns. The worst thing that can happen with a slide projector and a slide is that the bulb will go out. It's not necessarily that easy with digital technology."

Support from a foundation such as Mellon or one of the national endowments is often the only way museums with limited staff resources can digitize. At the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley (hearstmuseum.berkeley.edu), with nearly four million objects in its collection, digitization has been somewhat piecemeal, typically either through grants related to specific works that include a digitization component or when particular collections are pulled for research visits. "Because of staff limitations, digitization is often secondary to other projects - although everyone benefits when we're able to do it," says Josh Meehan, the museum's information systems manager.

Meehan estimates that between 15,000 and 20,000 objects have been digitized at Hearst - a small percentage of the holdings. But the museum is implementing a new database system, and eventually hopes to have most of its primary collections digitized. That will save time for researchers looking for particular objects and, through the creation of curated online exhibits, will give the public access to large portions of the collection that rarely, if ever, end up in the gallery. For students, Meehan adds, digitization can bring objects into the classroom that are too fragile to physically leave the museum. This is particularly valuable since, given the limited staff, it is difficult to schedule on-site classroom visits.

At UCLA's Fowler Museum of Cultural History (www.fmch.ucla.edu), the process of digitizing the collection of approximately 100,000 artifacts began in the early 1990s with funding from a private patron and was accelerated with recent grants from the Getty Foundation, which enabled the museum to electronically catalogue all of the collection's objects; and from the National Endowment for the Humanities, to selectively digitize approximately 7,000 items from several primary-source collections and disseminate them through the OAC. Already online are the works of African art historian Arnold Rubin and UCLA professor of puppetry arts Melvyn Helstein.

"What appeals to the NEH is that we are a museum participating in this online project that disseminates scholarly information - and we are doing it with library and information science professionals' standards," says Sarah Kennington, the Fowler Museum's registrar. "Projects such as this build bridges between museums and libraries."

Kennington agrees with the OAC's Chandler that archivists and educators still need to grapple with how digitization can best be exploited for teaching and learning. "A lot of content has been created, and now people are stepping back and trying to figure out how effectively that content is being utilized," she says.

Indeed, MOAC II, a user-evaluation study, is currently under way to formally assess MOAC content and usage. UC faculty, undergraduates, K-12 teachers, and museum, archival and library professionals will provide feedback to a research team led by the UCLA Department of Information Studies on how they integrate MOAC in research and teaching and on areas where they see room for improvement. "Few published studies have evaluated online museum content," says Layna White, collection information manager for the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts at UCLA and project manager of MOAC II. "We hope this will make a big impact on us as content providers, as well as inspiring more people to integrate our content into their work.

"Providing access is just a start. Equally important issues are whether people know how to find these materials, and how they use them once they do.