History of System Development

The idea for VIA originated in a 1997 report of the Visual Resources Task Group, entitled “Visual Resources at Harvard University,” recommending the establishment of a public union catalog of visual materials at Harvard and Radcliffe. In response, representatives from many museums, libraries, archives, and manuscript repositories at Harvard and Radcliffe worked with the Harvard University Library Office for Information Systems to define a multi-phase project to implement such a catalog.

A VIA Steering Committee was formed to oversee the project, coordinating several working groups that addressed access/metadata, copyright, scanning, and interface/indexing issues. In the Fall semester of 1998, records from 6 repositories were loaded into a publicly available database system. The contributing repositories were

• Fine Arts Library Visual Collections
• Frances Loeb Library Visual Resources Department, Harvard Design School
• Harvard University Art Museums
• Houghton Library Department of Printing and Graphic Arts
• Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology
• Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America

These repositories were selected because they represent different kinds of institutions including museums, libraries, archives, and manuscript repositories. At that time, they all had local collection management or access systems that could supply data to VIA. By combining data from these diverse repositories into a common database, VIA continues to refine its guidelines concerning best practices of making visual resources known to the Harvard community and to determine where data standards could be adopted across repositories to optimize resource discovery.