Work is underway to make public again a University of Vermont (UVM) website that was a favorite among historians, teachers, and media sites. The Changing Landscape Archive went online in 1999 and is home to approximately 72,000 images of the state’s landscape over more than a century. According to a UVM statement posted at the landscape archive website, “The site is offline and will remain so until we are able to create a redesign and implementation that meets current standards for development.”
“All 70,000 plus images are inaccessible, but they’re safe,” said the archive’s director, UVM environmental science professor Paul Bierman. At present, he is working with computer programmer Katrina Czar to update the site for public use. “I intend to have the archive back up in a read-only format by the end of the year,” said Czar in a recent email statement, “however, that is contingent on it getting the all-clear from our security team.”
Bierman said he is paying independently for the work to modernize the code of the digital photo archive. “This is a pretty massive undertaking,” he said. “It’s like upgrading things from a version six to a version nine … thousands and thousands of lines of code need to be updated.”
The Changing Landscape Archive was funded with an $800,000 federal grant from both the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Over several years in the early 2000s, UVM students were hired to collect, scan, upload, and write descriptions of photos from all over Vermont designed to show how the state’s landscape has changed. Included in the archive are approximately 32,000 images of the build-out of Vermont’s interstate highway system.
You can read more in an article by Sylvia C. Dodge published in the northstarmonthly web site at: https://tinyurl.com/4cn5cekk.