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Hi all A few people have asked about the technical details relating to the image library. Our e-services department have built a bespoke Web site application for the site, built on Microsoft technology. It is hosted on secured servers at Rackspace. After much discussion, we decided to use the categories / topics which appear as Knowledge categories on the ICE main website www.ice.org.uk<http://www.ice.org.uk>. Our library books, website articles etc are tagged to these topics and our members can sign up to these areas of interest so it seemed sensible to use the same subjects. We also added `people' and most of the engineering images at least fit easily into one or sometimes several of these topics. The images which have been harder to categorise are the more general images e.g. Cooke's views of London which are mainly tagged as structures. We didn't want to have too many themes or categories though and felt 6 or 7 would probably be enough otherwise people have to trawl through too many categories. We did have an energy category but we didn't have many images and those we did have fitted into `structures' e.g. power stations. It may be reinstated as more images are added. We already had a large number of scanned images but these had been produced over a number of years and were of variable quality. We began by removing any which were poor quality and then began to select interesting images to fit into the chosen categories to give a feel for the breadth of the collection. We are also looking at upcoming anniversaries, hence the London Underground images. There has been much discussion as to the way forward. We have looked at the standards for scanning to ensure all images scanned in future and have been discussing whether it is better to upload a whole batch from one collection 9as we did with Cooke's views) or to continue to provide a good spread. Personally, I wanted to include as much information as possible about the source of the images, making the resource an information source rather than just a straight commercial site. For me, it is important to know where an image, particularly an archive image comes from a) for referencing and b) so if someone comes in to see an image we can find it quickly without having to resort to spreadsheets to find where the original is. We are still getting to grips with the cataloguing the images but I hope we have made a good start. It can be easy to get tied up with different types of original formats - lithographs, chromolithographs etc when sometime `print' is sufficient if we are going to actually get the material online. I hope this is useful, it has been a steep learning curve but hopefully the view is worth it. Carol Carol Morgan Archivist Institution of Civil Engineers One Great George Street, Westminster, London SW1P 3AA t +44 (0)20 7665 2043 f +44 (0)20 7976 7610 ice.org.uk Did you know you can browse and purchase images from our collections? Visit http://ice-imagelibrary.com/ Follow us on Twitter @ICELibrary<blocked::http://twitter.com/ICELibrary>. We hope this response is useful, please help us improve our service by filling in our survey at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/archive Civil engineers at the heart of society, delivering sustainable development through knowledge, skill and professional expertise. _______________________________________________________________________ This communication, and the information it contains: (a) is intended for the person(s) or organisation(s) named above and for no other persons or organisations and (b) may be confidential and protected by law. Unauthorised use, copying or disclosure of any of it may be unlawful. Thomas Telford Ltd Company Registration No: 2556636 Registered Office: 1-7 Great George Street, London SW1P 3AA. This email has been scanned for all viruses by the MessageLabs SkyScan service on behalf of the Institution of Civil Engineers. For more information on a proactive anti-virus service working around the clock, around the globe, visit http://www.messagelabs.com ________________________________________________________________________ Contact the list owner for assistance at [log in to unmask] For information about joining, leaving and suspending mail (eg during a holiday) see the list website at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=archives-nra