The Problem Most people teaching geography or other environmental subjects have their own collections of slides, frequently the product of years, or even decades, of travel and diligent work. Students agree that good pictures make a class come alive. But few of us are willing to loan our slides, even to our closest colleagues. Duplicate slides are never as good as the originals, and there is no practical way to include location and subject captions with the slides.
Frequent use exposes a slide collection to possible damage or loss.
So an individual's slide collection is really only accessible when he or she can personally present it. The Solution Digital storage of photographic images, and their distribution over computer networks, solves many of these problems. Duplication is easy, cheap, and the duplicates are identical to the originals. Degradation and loss are no longer an issue. Captions can be stored in databases associated with the images, providing sorting and searching capabilities that would be almost impossible otherwise.