VIA overview

The Visual Information Access (VIA) system is a publicly available union catalog of visual resources at Harvard. It includes information about slides, photographs, objects and artifacts in the university's libraries, museums and archives. To access VIA, point a web browser to the URL: http://via.harvard.edu

VIA provides a web-based interface for searching and viewing visual image cataloging and related thumbnail images (see Database scope for more information). Many thumbnail images contain links to full-screen images.

Records in VIA are contributed to the system from a variety of local cataloging systems at participating libraries, archives, and museums. One of these local systems, OLIVIA, is supported by OIS for units with no pre-existing local cataloging system. Cataloging metadata for visual images is described in the documents Metadata in VIA and VIA data element list.