A Virtual Time-Machine

As it is getting close to the end of the semester, I am frantic. And I'm hungry. And I can't think straight anymore. So here I am trying to find something to Blog about in the realm of digitization projects. My first attempt, Google-ing "digital food" was less than spectacular. However, my next attempt, Google-ing "digital archives" rendered an interesting website called "250+ Killed Digital Websites." I'll bet someone else found this. And like me, someone else probably followed a couple of links. So I'm blogging about one of the links that I followed. And it's sort of cool, although it was definitely more fun to just look at vast disparity of digitization projects across the country. Mississippi, for example, has only one digital archive listed. How sad, but that's not my focus here.

Instead, I'm focusing on the Vermont Landscape Change Program. The site offers a glimpse of the last 200 years of Vermont's changing face.
The site offers a variety of search options, by keyword, image popularity, chronology, etc. The images themselves vary in quality, but the exhaustive number of artifacts available (over 14,000) is remarkable. Additionally, users are encouraged to submit their own images, both historical and current, so the collection is constantly growing.


One very noteworthy aspect of the Vermont image collection is the extensive attention to metadata collection. Each image is tagged and contains deep descriptive as well as administrative metadata. Although the site purports to be a public service for the people of Vermont, this attention to meticulous metadata collection and the overall usability of the site makes it a viable resource for academic research. Additionally, because the site is sponsored by the University of Vermont and at least 20 other public and private archives and libraries across the state, the information collected here is not only sustainable, but interoperable not only state-wide, but nationally.

The subject of Vermont's geologic and architectural evolution may not be the most sexy of digitization projects. But this site is so well laid out, so thoroughly packed with findable and searchable information, and so meticulously documented that it really is a model of what digitization could be. It is more than just throwing images up onto the Internet. It is the creation of a cohesive and sustainable record of relevant and usable information.