Wisconsin aerial photos: A modern update for a historic collection

As visitor after visitor to the Arthur H. Robinson Map Library came to use a 70-year old collection of historic photos of the Wisconsin landscape, Jaime Stoltenberg realized that something needed to be done.

The library houses a large collection of aerial photos of the state, taken by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to estimate crop acreage across the country. The first comprehensive survey of Wisconsin was flown in the late 1930s and yielded roughly 35,000 contact prints that reveal a patchwork of farms, forests, and towns and can be tiled together to reconstruct the entire state.

Now, the old photos are showing their age — fraying, worn, and bearing marks of generations of hands — and the librarian cannot let them circulate for fear the irreplaceable resource might be lost.

“This is the most heavily used part of the map library’s collection,” Stoltenberg says. She also wonders how many other people would benefit from the photos but do not make it to the third floor of Science Hall.

As the Robinson Library map and geographic information systems librarian, she well understands the broad appeal of these literal snapshots in time. “People have a curiosity about place,” she says. The photos “provide people with that historical perspective.”

With her latest project, she is taking one element of this sense of place out of the picture — Madison itself. With the Department of Geography, the UW Digital Collections Center (UWDCC), and the Wisconsin state cartographer’s office, Stoltenberg received a grant from the Ira and Ineva Reilly Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment to digitize the 1930s aerial photo collection and put it online. When the three-year project is complete, the collection will be digitally accessible by people anywhere in the world.

“I was always impressed with the size of this collection,” says Stoltenberg. With the physical prints, however, she has had to find a balance between providing access to the collection and protecting the resource itself.

“With how often our photos are used, a lot of them are fraying and tearing,” she says. “Of course, something this old will deteriorate over time, and the more people touch it and the more we have to file it,” the worse the wear becomes. In addition, their non-circulating status means people must trek to the UW–Madison campus to see them.

She has wanted to try digitizing a collection for years, and the aerial photos seemed like the perfect candidate. “In terms of collections that are accessed and used on a regular basis, at least a third of the people are coming in to use these,” she says. The Baldwin grant program and local collaborations offered the needed springboard.

“Many of the people who use these photos are people from the general public. They come from all over the state to find photos of their land, their property, for various reasons. Sometimes it’s for a property dispute, where the deed to their property says that the western boundary is a railroad that no longer exists, and they need to find a photo of when the railroad was there,” she says. “Sometimes they’ve owned rural land for a long time, it’s been in their family and they want to see what it looked like back in the ’30s when their grandparents lived there. [The photos] are really useful to see how the land has changed over time.”

Other users have included engineering consultants researching site development history, scientists, and students. “We’re aiming at a very broad audience — educators, real estate developers, environmentalists. We want everyone to use these,” says geography professor Mark Harrower, co-director of the project.

In addition to improving access for all these groups, Harrower also hopes that bringing the collection online will add value to the photos themselves by opening up new possible uses. UWDCC head Peter Gorman agrees, pointing out that digital materials become much more malleable. They can be combined with other existing information and take advantage of the strengths of multiple fields — the archiving abilities of the library, the mapping strengths of the geographic information software.

“Tying together these different things is much easier to do now. It’s opening up huge new possibilities,” Gorman says.

Harrower envisions creating a searchable, user-friendly interface with which people can find individual photos and link in other types of related information. For example, the aerial photos might be combined with historical records, maps, Public Land Survey notes, scientific studies, deeds, and other documents. “Now that it’s a digital resource, we’re hoping people will use it in ways we never thought of,” he says.

Stoltenberg says, “When you’re working with geographic [materials], the one thing you always have in common is the sense of place — this is what links everything together.”

Digitization will also help users gain a sense of time from the historical photos. The U.S. Department of Agriculture still takes aerial surveys of the state, but now all the photos are taken digitally and housed on the Web. Recent photo sets can be viewed online at http://www.WisconsinView.org.

The ability to put the old and the new side by side, Stoltenberg says, will be one of the strongest features. “It will give people an opportunity to get a thorough historical perspective of what Wisconsin was like at different periods of time.”

The process of documenting the sets of photos — the team has sorted through about 10 of Wisconsin’s 72 counties so far — has already revealed some interesting observations. “In pictures of Dane County from 1937, there’s no Beltline, there’s no interstate,” Stoltenberg says. “It’s interesting to see how people traveled at that time and how long it probably took to get from one place to another.”

She hopes the digitized photos will help other people find their own surprises and their own history. “A lot of the rural lands from that time have significantly changed, and sometimes [these photos are] the only record of what those properties looked like,” Stoltenberg says. “Something like this is very personal to people.”

Standing in the Robinson library, she surveys the rows of filing cabinets that house the full aerial photo collection. “The age of the contact print is nearly over,” she says, a bit wistfully. “But that’s why this project is so valuable.”

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• Jill Sakai, (608) 262-9772, jasakai@wisc.edu