The University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee has just released a brand new digital collection of over 5,500 photographic images from the slide collections of the American Geographic Society Library. 3,284 color slides were chosen for this project from the extensive Harrison Forman slide collection. Forman’s special interest was in Asia, but his collection also covers cities across all continents. The selected images span the years from 1958 to 1978 The Cities Around the World Collection (http://www.uwm.edu/Libraries/digilib/cities/index.html) focuses on the main subject areas of: City & Town Life, Architecture, Views, Transportation, and People.
UWM's digitization unit researches each of the scanned images to provide rich, high quality metadata for digitization projects. I have always enjoyed travel, but when I worked on this collection for 3 semesters while I was enrolled in the School of Information Studies, I found myself discovering the joys of armchair travel through metadata! I learned a great deal from both my studies in library school and my internship in UWM Libraries' Digital Collections and it is very rewarding to see all the hard work pay off with this exciting launch.