It's about time for the final art history slide reviews, which are students last chance to see the hundreds of works of art that flashed by on the screen throughout the term. Or are they?
Thanks to a new computer imaging project, art history students may not need to sweat any longer. Visual Resources, the department responsible for the art history slide collection, began to making images shown in class available for students to view on computer.
The experimental project began this fall with Art History 45, a class on Baroque art..
In the past students could not view slides outside of the classroom because there was no room with enough room for large groups. Professors usually schedule an in-class slide review before each exam and place books with some of the pictures on reserve. Beyond this there was no way for students to study the slides on their own.
"You spend a lot of time looking through books again for the images that you saw in class for 30 seconds," Tracie Waack '94 said.
"We never thought that was enough," said Elizabeth O'Donnell, the department's curator.
Last year the department applied for a grant from the College's Computing Technology Venture Fund, and in the spring received approximately $20,000 for hardware, software and other costs.
Similar programs exist at a few other schools, such as Duke University. The Dartmouth project is one of the first to be offered on a campus-wide network, and the software that makes that possible is being developed here by Roger Brown, the Senior Academic Software Engineer for Computing Services.
The slides shown in each lecture are scanned into the computer, then brief data about each picture is added. The files are stored in the Art History 45 course folder by class date. The images are accessible by any computer with System 7 linked to Kiewit Computational Center..
Some students have had trouble getting onto the program because it cannot handle a lot of students at one time. "There have been glitches," said O'Donnell. "We're hoping at some point to get on a bigger, faster file server."
A student password helps make sure that the images are not used for non-educational purposes. There are also blocks built into the system to prevent users from printing the slides.
Although the original image is scanned into Adobe Photoshop, a photo processing program, in full color, the monitors that Kiewit and most students own have only 8-bit color capability, so the colors may not be true.
"The color wasn't beautiful," Waack said. "But you generally don't need to see the colors that much anyway."
Jan Smarsnik, the assistant curator, explained that the computer images are not as good as the slides. "It's a good copy, but each time you copy something it's less and less real," she said.
"We're not trying to keep the students from going to class or to the slide review," said Smarsnik. "This is a study aid, not a replacement."
Len Mead '94 agrees. "It makes studying easier if you miss a class, but nobody would ever use it by choice in place of the class," he said.
O'Donnell said that student responses have been positive.
"All the time and energy we spend is for the students' benefit, and we hope they find it useful," Smarsnik said.
"Everyone I have talked to says it's a fabulous program. I definitely plan to use it for the final exam," said Waack.
Visual Resources hopes to add one course to the program each term.
