The funds from
my Murdock award were used to develop a digital library of images that I
use each year when teaching Flowering Plant family recognition characteristics
to students in my upper-division course, Bio 332: Vascular Plant Diversity. In past years, I have utilized 35mm slides
from my personal collection and a slide projector to introduce students during
lab to general features of the morphology and ecology of members of 29 flowering
plant families. A considerable
amount of time was spent each year outside of class loading and unloading
carousels with the slides for each week's families. As part of the recent Biology Building
renovation, teaching labs were equipped with digital data projectors. This new technology presented me with
the opportunity to create a digital slide show for each week's families that
would require minimal time to prepare in future years. A second goal of the project was to generate
web pages with the digital images of each family to give students access
to the full set of images that they see in lab each week. An important component of this second
goal was to associate each image with the kinds of descriptive data (e.g. scientific and common names for
each plant, location of the plant, etc.) that I communicate when showing
the images to students during lab.
The first goal
of creating a set of digital slide shows that I can use each year in lab
was very successful. Funds from
the award were used to have my standard set of 35mm slide images that I've
used in past years converted to digital images and placed on photo-cds. A total of 659 slide images were scanned
to photo-cd by Wy'East Color, Inc. A fair amount of processing time remained after receiving
the photo-cds. I elected to
convert each image to jpeg-format for the digital slide show. I have then been projecting the images
during lab using JPEG-viewer on one of the Biology Department's G4-laptops
which is linked to the lab's data projector. I used Adobe Photoshop to convert each image to jpeg format,
which also afforded me the opportunity to rename each file and edit the image
content and quality. Handling
each image in this manner took much more time than I anticipated and limited
my opportunity to accomplish the second goal. In spring 2002, the time I had been spending each year loading
and unloading 35mm slide carousels was replaced with the time involved in
organizing the slides for scanning to photo-cd and then converting each image
to jpeg format. For my current
(2003) class, I have been able to utilize the images created last year with
minimal need for modification, and the time-savings have consequently been
substantial.
The second goal
of creating stand-alone, web-based slide shows of the Flowering Plant family
images for the students to view outside of lab has not been accomplished. All of my 35mm slides are labeled with
information regarding the scientific name (Latin binomial), the common name,
and the location where the plant was photographed. In consultation with Fred Lifton, I elected to use Portfolio
5.0 (Extensis) which is a software package which is designed for managing
digital media files. My plan
was to import the images into Portfolio, and then add the data for each slide
image into the Portfolio database. Portfolio
can export stand-alone slideshows that can be viewed using their image viewer,
and it can also export web pages in which the data fields associated with
each image are included along with the image. Either
of these options seemed like a good way to replicate for students the information
I present to them each year in lab. I have been successful in using the Portfolio software to
import images and create slide shows, and I have also been able to create
custom datafields to allow for the relevant data to be recorded for each
image. Unfortunately, entering
the data for each of the more than 700 digital files now in my collection
proved to be too daunting a task to complete last spring. This second goal is one that I am continuing to work on as
time permits, with the hope of being finished in time for my course in spring,
2004.