HISTORICAL IMAGERY COLLECTIONS IN SPATIAL LIBRARY: KEY TO DISCOVERY OF PAST LANDSCAPES

A digital library collection of historic imagery offers views of landforms and landscapes of the past. The University of Arkansas (UA) Libraries, Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies (CAST), and Geosciences Department are collaboratively building a digital library collection of historically significant remotely-sensed imagery. UA Emeritus Professor Harold MacDonald of the Geology Department donated the imagery film of SEASAT, aircraft radar, Skylab, aerial photography and SIR-A, from the 1960s to 1980s, to the UA Libraries' Special Collections Department. The funding for this collaborative project, now in its second year, is provided by the Arkansas Center for Space and Planetary Sciences/NASA.

In the first year of the imagery project, digitization and web access were developed, including methods of scientific scanning and metadata organization for the five “series” of imagery. A Web page was created for the project. In the second year, the imagery is being developed as a geospatial digital library collection, with more flexible geographic query capability. The historic imagery collection will be part of the new UA Spatial Library (UASL), being constructed by CAST. The UASL will serve as the browser-based interface to search and access the catalog of metadata and to view/download the imagery. The Web page for the historic imagery project serves as a portal to the UASL's digital library collection, and links from the UA Libraries Special Collections as a user finding aid and from the UA Libraries Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Maps web-based Program as historic geospatial data. Users can discover landscapes of the past, important in the analysis of geologic and geographic features and in the detection of land cover changes.