Personal Research & Teaching Images in MDID (FPICs)

FPICs is an acronym for Faculty Personal Image Collections. It is an initiative to help faculty at Colgate digitize and/or organize personal research and teaching images and make them available and easily retrievable online via MDID. An added advantage is that storage and backup for these collections is built in to MDID. No more worrying about hard drive crashes or digging through server folders looking for that ONE image!

Examples of current FPICs projects include fieldwork and travel images, personal copystand slides used for teaching, research images from museums, and studio artists' own work.

If you are a Colgate faculty member (current OR retired) interested in creating your own digital image collection through the VR library, contact the VR Curator for more information.

FAQs

Who is eligible for an FPICs collection?

Any faculty member interested in having their personal research or teaching image collection digitized and/or organized can have an FPICs collection in MDID. All you need to do is contact the Visual Resources Curator to begin the planning process.

Do my images have to be of art or architecture?

Not at all! We have several collections of fieldwork images from social sciences research, for example. If you have images, we can help you digitize and organize them so that they can be easily retrieved and used in the classroom, for research, and for publication.

How long does it take to get things digitized and/or put online?

We have no set ‘turn-around time’ as to how soon your analog images will be digitized and/or uploaded to the database, but if you have a deadline in mind, make this known and we will try to accommodate it to the best of our abilities.

Who can see my images?

You choose the permissions for access to your collection. It can be visible only to you, only to Colgate faculty, only to students, to the entire campus, or to specific individuals. Access to MDID is limited to Colgate users--you must log on with your Colgate ID and password--so your collection can never be accessed via the Internet by unauthorized users. In other words, your collection will never show up in a Google search.

Only I understand how my slides/digital images are organized and I don't have time for a lot of cataloguing! What do I do?

We understand that your time is precious, so we make it a little easier for you to organize your slides or digital images. You decide how in-depth you want the images to be catalogued. Most faculty simply divide their images into thematic groups, as a starting point, and provide a few pertinent keywords or terms for each group. If in the future you want to add more information to your collection, we can easily update your records. Additionally, any data written on individual slides, or included with a digital image (such as its original filename) will be recorded and will serve as additional catalogue information.

Can I recruit a student worker to organize my images?

Absolutely! Ideally, a student with whom you already have a relationship may take more time and be more careful with your collection and be a bit more invested in the outcome of your project. Also, if he/she is already familiar with your work, he/she may be relied upon to fill in additional data on an image-by-image basis when slides are not marked with anything. We are happy to teach your student use our software and they are welcome to do their work in the Visual Resources Library.