Images are of central importance in urban design. Slides and photographs provide direct evidence of artefacts, landscapes, and activities in ways that written accounts and other historical documents cannot. A picture can indeed be worth a thousand words ... and yet while several excellent public-access image collections now exist in local, provincial, and federal archives, an untapped wealth sits in obscurity in boxes and filing cabinets, unknown and inaccessible to all but a handful of users. Sharing the material in these private collections is of particular interest in urban design, where community stakeholders play so central a role in project development.
An exciting project has been underway since the autumn of 2007 in collaboration with the Network in Canadian History and Environment (NICHE) project. The project aims to digitise image collections and to develop an online catalogue with a user-friendly interface so that anyone with access to a web browser can peruse the collections and retrieve specific images that may be of use for research, public events, local history associations, and so on. By creating high-resolution digital versions of the original slides, it becomes easier to store and maintain the images in large collections, and for a wide range of users to consult the images.
The team has already roved through several thousand images, using selections from the superbly-catalogued collection of Professor Tom McIlwraith (recently retired from the University of Toronto). The first phase of the CCLAIR project has focused largely on the logistical and procedural requirements for scanning and cataloguing large image collections. Now that a standard failsafe process had been developed, the research is expanding to the design and implementation of a functional web interface which would use the NICHE website as its main portal. It is anticipated that a trial version of this will be developed by the winter of 2010.
The CCLAIR project is not only about environmental history. Given the obvious applications for architecture, urban design, and landscape planning, the CCLAIR project is dovetailed with initiatives are now underway at McGill’s Facility for Architectural Research in Media and Mediation (FARMM). The team is working with local government and NGOs in the Montréal area, developing interactive tools useful for community engagement in the development of city-building projects. In addition to processing scholarly slide collections, the project could eventually integrate supplementary technical knowledge from architects, hydrologists, and geologists, or ‘soft’ knowledge from historians, writers, and artists, not to mention other media such as film and audio. Possibilities are already being explored to see how to use geographic information systems for more intuitive querying and spatial analysis (e.g. search-by-map). For the moment, the project is focusing on building a solid foundation for future expansion.