Historical Image Collection

The Cofrin Center for Biodiversity at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay has acquired several image collections documenting the natural communities and natural history of the Western Great Lakes. The material has considerable reference value, but its usefullness has been limited by the fact that much of it is in the form of prints and transparencies. In 2015, the Biodiversity Center proposed an effort to stop the loss of information due to ongoing deterioration of the originals and to make the information more available for researchers. The key components of the project are: Creation of a catalog database for each collection. Where practical, the catalog file includes photopoint locations Creation of a medium-resolution (jpeg file format) copy of each image to it to be displayed on the project website Creation of a high-resolution (tif file format) copy of selected images Creation of a website for viewing collection contents and retrieving jpeg versions of individual images Efforts to get the project off the ground received a major boost from the Fox-Wolf Watershed Alliance. FWWA allocated $29,000 in Great Lakes Observing System (GLOS) funding to the Biodiversity Center in 2016 and the first half of 2017. The scanning and cataloging work performed under the contract with FWWA has protected a large cache of important information from loss and improved its availability to researchers.