The images are part of an extensive collection of aerial photography taken by the U.S. Forest Service and held in the library’s Archives and Special Collections department.
“The Forest Service collection we received has tens of thousands of aerial images dating from the 1930s to the 1970s,” said Professor Donna McCrea, the head of archives. “We are focusing on the imagery from the 1930s. So far we’ve created an online index map that indicates the latitude and longitude of about 35,000 images, and we’ve made about 3,500 images available online.”
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She said the format of the images – 9-by-9-inch negatives on reels of film that contain 200 to 600 images each – has made providing access to them challenging. The library had to custom build a platform to safely hold the film reels as the images were being scanned.
“Initially, we didn’t receive any sort of index or inventory to the images, so we really didn’t know what we had” McCrea said. “We owe an enormous debt of gratitude to John Pierce, who volunteered his time over several years to identify the locations of the images. This project would not be possible with him.”
This index map for the historical aerial photographs uses purple circles to indicate the locations of images, while blue triangles indicate an image has been scanned and made available online.
She said the project received a significant boost in 2022 with a $10,000 grant from the Foundation for Montana History, which funded a part-time project manager with Geographic Information System experience.
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The original images were sent from the Region 1 headquarters in Missoula to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., in the 1980s. UM Archives and Special Collections holds duplicate images that were gifted to the library in the 1990s. McCrea said the Forest Service does not have plans to digitize the originals, so the library took on the project.
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
