NITLE's Online Publication about Visual Resources in Liberal Education

At the beginning of last month NITLE published (on their website) an article about Visual Resources by Roger C. Schonfeld. Something worth a look as we continue to think about Digital Asset Management at Wheaton:

The Visual Resources Environment at Liberal Arts Colleges

Here's a little piece from the introduction:

The findings are based on visits to seven liberal arts colleges in late 2004 and early 2005, which were designed to examine the role images play in teaching and learning. Although a number of campuses had developed viable strategies for the provision of digital images and the organizational plan and campus culture to support those strategies, several of the institutions we visited suffered from an organizational structure or campus culture that was ill-suited to take the strategic choices needed to encourage a transition to digital images. As the section on Campus Roles and Responsibilities explains at greater length, we saw two fundamentally different organizational models for the information services units that support image provision, one of which was much more successful than the other. [1] The role of the slide library or visual resources collection was the ultimate variable, and those campuses on which the slide library takes a campus-wide perspective (rather than serving the art history department alone) seem to see much easier and more successful transitions to digital images.