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A climbing party in Glacier National Park, Montana, during the summer of 1925.

Beginning around 1870, lantern slide projectors were the dominant way of projecting photographic images--until the 1970s, when the 35-millimeter slide format surged in popularity. Lantern slides are big, heavy, and fragile, since they are made of glass. One way of making them was by contact-printing a photographic negative onto a special emulsion-coated glass plate. Their capacious size (most are 3-by-4-inch rectangles, and some are as large as 8 by 10 inches) captures a great deal of information, so their image quality is often high.

But how to display these pictures today? Lantern slide projectors, once a fixture in fine arts courses, are now quite rare. The Frances Loeb Library at the Graduate School of Design (GSD) has one, however, along with 45,000 lantern slides. This archive combines the one-time teaching collections in architecture, landscape architecture, and city planning, the three departments whose merger formed the GSD in 1936.

The lantern-slide collection includes items like this aerial photograph of the lower end of Manhattan Island.

Recently, visual resources librarian Ann Whiteside of the Loeb Library supervised the conversion of about 2,500 of the lantern slides to digital format. They offer a panoptic view of American culture between 1850 and 1920, especially its built environment. (A few of the images themselves date from after 1920.) A grant from the Library of Congress and Ameritech funded the conversion. Soon, the 2,500 images will become accessible on the Library of Congress's American Memory page on the World Wide Web (see "E-mail and Web Information," page 19). The two images presented here preview these visual riches, and allow us a glimpse into

American history through the lens of a lantern-slide projector and the eyes of photographers of a bygone era.

~ Craig Lambert

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