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Many disciplines have collections of visually-oriented materials that need to be managed, from photographs and slides to diagrams and charts, from maps to manuscripts to objects (or what librarians used to call "realia"). Most (though by no means all) of these collections reside in libraries, museums, and archives.
Access and management of these collections pose enormous problems for their institutions. Because the images/objects are often very fragile, there has been a constant tension between access and preservation--the more they're looked at, the faster they deteriorate. Cataloging has been inadequate-a picture often requires more than a thousand words to describe it. Items tend to be relatively unique, so searching for cataloging copy is generally not productive. Original cataloging at the item level has been considered a very low priority, so the sparse cataloging that has been done has generally focused on collection-level records.
But technology is beginning to catch up. The coming "Information Superhighway" plans to deliver a wealth of "multimedia content," which has both promoted speculation on the value of visual materials (as we can see from the highly-inflated prices being paid for corporations, such as Paramount, which own large quantities of visual materials) and has spurred the development of technologies to capture, store, manage, and deliver multimedia material.
Computers can now store not just cataloging records about images and objects, but surrogate images as well. Giving users access to onscreen images can vastly improve search precision and help to preserve the originals. Users with access to surrogate images are likely to require far less detailed descriptive information in their cataloging records, which holds out the possibility that museums and libraries can quicken the pace of cataloging these materials.
On the technical side, with increases in storage capacity and in telecommunications bandwidth, multiuser image databases are finally becoming financially feasible. On college campuses, libraries and computer centers are beginning to offer online access to collections of images as a part of their increased set of services in their roles as clearinghouses for all kinds of campus information. (Editor's Note: See the article by Jennifer Cox and Mohammed Taleb of the University of Arizona, "Images on. the Internet: Enhanced User Access" in the August 1994 issue of DATABASE, pages 18.26.--PH)
At Cornell, students can query a...