The Implementation of Project Caprina™

The Caprina™ project began in Fall, 1992, as a collaboration between the Department of Art History and Archaeology and the Computer Science Center. Art History has a collection of about 250,000 slides. While this collection is well managed and effectively housed, access to it is limited to the faculty and some graduate students; there is no way that access by the hundreds of undergraduate art history students could be accommodated either physically or administratively. Therefore, while there were many possible ways to begin digitizing the collections, it appeared that the most pressing need was to provide undergraduate students with convenient access to images.

Once this decision was made, it was clear that other departments also could benefit from the project with little additional effort: collaborations are underway with Architecture (which also has a collection of about 250,000 slides), American Studies, Chinese, Horticulture, and Anthropology.

Since ease of image accessibility was a key design goal, it was natural for the basic delivery mechanism to be the Campus data network. This network reaches over 13,000 faceplates on Campus with both optical fiber and 10baseT Ethernet. The basic protocol is TCP/IP but it also passes Novell Netware packets so that any of the 8000+ computers on the network can potentially reach any of the 70+ Novell servers.

The 1000+ computers in the 30+ student computing labs on Campus are all attached to the network. However, the NeXT computers have monochrome monitors and the Apple computers cannot access the Novell servers--they use local AppleTalk servers; therefore, the initial thrust of the project was use Windows-based computers (IBM-compatible computers). This is the dominant type of computer on Campus. Most of them have monitors with 1024x768 pixel resolution at 256 colors which displays a very good image. Microsoft Windows 3.1 is the standard operating system. (Upgrades to some Novell servers and use of the World-Wide-Web are extending access to Macintosh and Unix-based computers.)

Other requirements of the Caprina™ are to reduce the impact of its installation on the operation of the student computing labs, and to provide access to the images from faculty offices with as little special set up as possible.

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