To the Editor:

Re: “Rippling Beyond Sibley,” Editorial, March 12.

Dean Kleinman,

As a former employee of Cornell University and as the former Assistant Director of the Knight Visual Resources Facility, I am writing to you to express my deep concerns over the recent decision by the College of Architecture, Art and Planning to shut down the Knight Visual Resources Facility.

I, along with a very large number of professionals in my field, believe this decision is one of the most shortsighted decisions to be made by an institution as well regarded as Cornell University. In all the literature I have read about the recent decision to shut down the KVRF, heavy emphasis has been placed on the fact that it is an analog slide collection that takes up valuable AAP real estate and is one of the largest university slide collections in North America. What has not been talked about so much is the fact that the KVRF has always stayed abreast of developing technologies in order to move that collection forward into the digital realm. In the six years I worked for the KVRF, 1998-2004, this was the main priority of my job. Technology afforded us the opportunity to develop a digitally-based instructional resource.

As visual resource professionals working in the KVRF, we were constantly developing the technology and databases in order to create a strictly digital teaching collection because we knew this is the way that instruction was headed.

Margaret Webster, the director of the KVRF, is a highly respected member of the visual resources community and has always looked towards the future. She has an active interest in how current technologies can be used to improve the way faculty teach and students learn. She has always been ahead of the curve in this regard and is highly respected because of it. Margaret Webster was also a mentor to me and many decisions I make in my daily work are often influenced by her knowledge and wisdom. In today’s rapidly evolving technological environment, it is crucial that media collections, regardless of format, look at the audiences they serve and adapt so that the largest number of faculty and students have access to the tools they require. This is especially important during times of recession and institutional cutbacks, as the new technologies strive to improve efficiency.

The department I oversee at the Ontario College of Art & Design, Visual Resources, has been actively re-inventing itself over the past few years in order to accommodate the many technological advancements in teaching and research. Much of this has been done in the face of institutional cutbacks. Five years ago, I began my position overseeing the image collection, a static, analog slide collection. At that time, I instituted a digital strategy for the department in order to remain relevant. We ceased analog slide production immediately and began to build a strictly digital collection based on faculty requests. We now have the largest proprietary university image database in Canada, with just over 48,000 digital images. In 2008, faculty slide usage dropped 61 percent and student usage dropped another 60 percent, while the downloading of digital image content jumped 97 percent. We are also now streaming instructional video and lectures filmed in high definition.

Many of the decisions around re-inventing our visual resources department here at the Ontario College of Art & Design were inspired by decisions made by people like Margaret Webster and other VR professionals like her.

I have several questions with regards to the KVRF shut down decision: If the KVRF is and has actively been digitizing the analog slide collection and making them available in a variety of formats via ARTStor, the Luna Imaging database, as well as in their own in-house database, why can’t the physical slides be relocated off-site in order to accommodate AAP space concerns? How are faculty going to have access to the resources they need in order to do their jobs as instructors? Image requirements for faculty go well beyond anything they might find on Flickr.com or a Google image search. This is like saying the print resources and licensed information databases available within the library are not important because faculty can find the resources they need by simply doing a Google search. Is this professional scholarship? As the recession goes on and enrollments go up because people choose to go back to school in order to re-tool their skills, how will the College of Architecture, Art and Planning provide instructional resources, both human and electronic, to meet this demand?

Thank you for your time.

Eric Schwab

Manager, Visual Resources

Ontario College of Art & Design

Chair, Visual Resources Association, Canada Chapter