Digital Archive of American Architecture

Digital Archive of American Architecture

Compared with other sites I’ve visited for this blog, this site is pretty technologically challenged. It looks like the last time it was updated was in 2000, and it shows.

Selection
The images were included to be supplemental to Jeffery Howe’s undergraduate course taught at Boston College. Architecture from the 17th through 20th century is included, and can be browsed by location, architect, building types and style.

Metadata
The organization of the pages is strange – you can click on an image situated among others in a table, or scroll beneath the images to a section listing just the titles. Clicking on either the image or the titles links to the same larger image. Little metadata is available for the images – besides a title that includes the site. Any other descriptive metadata would be obtained by how the visitor located the image.

Object Characteristics
The naming convention for the files is not very good – some include capital letters while others are all lowercase. The files are named by section in which they are organized; for example, Ironworks01, Ironworks02, or 7gables, 8gables. The resolution of the JPEGs does not seem to be of the highest quality, but good enough to result in a fairly large, non-pixilated image.

Intended Audience
The audience was intended to be the professor’s students in the class, but now he has made the images available for anyone to use for educational purposes only. The intended audience is now researchers in architecture.