The Teaching Times - July, 2000. The project moves the core instructional technology in teaching the history of art and architecture from slide projection to digitized-image storage. Funding will be used for a computer server for storage, a cataloguing and retrieval database and employment of one person to give meaningful titles and a data base backup. A faculty member at Pitt for 20 years, Toker is regarded as the one of the pioneer professors at Pitt, and one of the first half dozen in the United States to employ digitized scans, rather than slides, for visual resources in teaching. He has done so since 1998, when he stopped using slides to teach the history of art.
Digital scans offer freedom from slides while providing comparable or superior images.
We ve been moving incrementally since 1995, but the scans have to be catalogued to be of any use. With this project, the scans will be accessible to the entire University, Toker said. The images to be catalogued start with an old departmental slide collection dating back to 1925. Scans can improve the visual quality of images and, unlike slides, do not deteriorate from use or age. . All Rights Reserved.