Digital Image Collection (Western Illinois University)

Project name and URL
Digital Image Collection (Western Illinois University)
http://collections.carli.illinois.edu/cdm4/index_wiu_digimgc.php?CISOROOT=/wiu_digimgc


Organization name
Western Illinois University

Description of what was digitized
This is a digital library of images from central Illinois, with emphasis on Western Illinios University, Macomb, IL, and McDonough county

Audience for the project
The audience for this project is anyone who is interested in pictures of small town america, scholars and historians of the early twentieth century.

Type of project background information available on the site
There is minimal information about this collection, just a brief blurb on the project main page. It is connected to several other collections throughout Illinois, however.

Additional comments

This small collection of photographs helps tell the story of a small college town in Illinois and how it has changed over the previous century. One thing I really liked about this database is that it was clearly put together by knowledgeable people-- as many of the photographs have meaningful blurbs describing the pictures. And in the case of stores that have moved, there is also previous locations listed, and other little trivia tidbits when necessary.

The search function is rudimentary, and unless you knew what exactly you were looking for wouldn't be much help. When you "browse" the collection, the files are all listed in alphabetical order. This doesn't help much, as there is very little intelligence to the file name. The files are just numbers, and are seemingly in randomly. That is, the pictures themselves aren't related to each other.

Still, for someone looking for photographs of a small town grocery store, or old university pictures, this is a decent collection.