The Media Center is working on developing a searchable database that would scour the collection and bring together images by time period, location, medium, subject matter and other criteria. With the permission of the Met, the department took its own digital photographs and combined them into an online, sometimes-animated tour. The next step for the digital reserve collection, once it is searchable, will be to add biographical information, historical notes and other contextual material. The site is used both by students for individual study and by faculty in class via an LCD projector, although some quality is lost in the projection and nobody is yet teaching wholly from Web images. I predict slides and projectors will have a long, long life.
Digital technology is a supplement.
The first monument studied in Art Humanities is the Parthenon. In addition to the images normally used, photographs and lantern slides dating back to the 1870s have been digitized and put into a Parthenon Web site. The School of Athens project is another Web-based presentation used by Art Hum sections in smart classrooms and at home. Period music that is studied in Music Hum plays in the background. The images are more interactive than just pictures on a computer screen.