Tools such as Mosaic make images integral parts of electronic publication and more accessible to users. Multimedia promises to advance the use of images even more broadly. Traditional image collections in colleges and universities reside in the archives, and the departments of architecture, art and art history. Also, numerous faculty have private image collections on a wide range of topics from history to biology which they use in their teaching or research. These collections are very labor intensive to manage and use, and they are often inaccessible to a broad base of users.
Students often have difficulty accessing images outside the classroom for review.
New attention given to teaching and learning via technology will likely heighten the use of images in the teaching and learning process. The museum and archival communities have vast stores of images which are inaccessible to the majority of users due to resources available to display them, or the limitations physical proximity. Electronic access to these collections via networks promises to unlock tremendous stores of our artistic and cultural heritage for countless students and scholars. There already exists a large commercial store of images from stock images such as Kodak's Picture Exchange to exotic images of the National Geographic's collection to the inventory of commercial photographers and publishers. The medical and scientific fields produce massive numbers of images annually.