DCA History

The College of Design (CDes) Digital Collections + Archives (DC+A) provides the College, its faculty, and students with a digital and analog repository of teaching and study images in support of college coursework and research. The DC+A's image repository is used for presentations in classes, study aids and for research by both faculty and students. The collection produces new content to meet the requirements of the faculty for teaching and provides the expertise and organization to catalog, classify, and maintain the images for use both over the web as digital images and in the traditional analog library collection of physical slides. To request content to be scanned please use the copywork order form.

The collection consists of approximately 300,000 slides, of which about 80,000 are now available in digital format. 80,000 objects in the archives, mainly drawings and lantern slides, await incorporation into the database.

The CDes 35mm slide collection has its origins in the personal slide collection of Professor George Winterowd, a faculty member who taught architectural history courses in the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture until the early 1980s. Many of the slides from this first stage of collection development came from travel photography performed by Professor Winterowd along with copy slides photographed from books and magazines and a small number of commercial slide purchases. Under Professor Winterowd's direction, and subsequently under the collection's first curator Marcia Ohlhausen, the slide collection grew to consist of approximately 85,000 slides used primarily for teaching purposes by faculty members in the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture later called the College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (CALA). The merger of CALA with the department of Design, Housing, and Apparel in July 2006 further grew the collection in the new College of Design.

We are continually working on restrospectively converting the existing analog materials in addition to building the collections through born digital objects from scans or digital photography.