A surreal array of images emerged, trapped in time by the click of a distant shutter: rockets, pie-eating contests, diving bells, Winston Churchill at the Orange Bowl. On it went, picture by picture. It took a year for UM archivist Koichi Tasa and his staff of part-time employees and students to sort through all 200-plus storage boxes of more than half a million fragile photographs, slides, and negatives dating back to the 1920s. In the process, they’ve indexed and organized thousands of archive-quality folders by subject matter and created a computer inventory that will make retrieval a relative snap.

Tasa and his crew continue to investigate unidentified images by speaking with alumni and poring through Ibis yearbooks, issues of the University of Miami Bulletin, and The Pathway to Greatness: Building the University of Miami, 1926-2001, a book by UM trustee Arva Moore Parks McCabe, M.A. ’71. Eventually each picture will be tagged with “metadata,” or contextual details, and professionally scanned.

“It’s fun when you can identify some place or someone,” team veteran Don Carreau, A.B. ’61, says. A UM reference librarian for 40 years, Carreau retired in 2002, working part-time in collection development until May, when he was called to join Tasa.

Dean and University Librarian Bill Walker says preserving the University’s heritage is one of the library’s most important roles. It’s also labor intensive and expensive. Archive-quality folders cost about five times as much as regular photo-storage supplies, Tasa notes. For the project’s final phase, Lyn MacCorkle, UM’s Digital Project Development librarian, is developing searchable Web presentations of the collection from high-resolution, archival-quality scans. So far, she and the library’s scanning technicians have digitized more than 6,000 images.

The goal, says Tasa, is to digitize around 50,000, which will cost approximately $100,000 and take three years, depending on how quickly auxiliary funds are raised. Donors who help sponsor images ($50 for a set of 25, and so on) receive permanent name recognition.

Reunion classes got a glimpse of the project’s potential on a preview Web page MacCorkle created for Homecoming 2008 in October, http://scholar.library.miami.edu/UMmemories/.

“People really got engaged in this,” she says. “The history of the University resonates when you start looking through the images.”

Once online, Tasa explains, this vast resource will be invaluable: “The University’s visual history will be available to anyone, anywhere in the world.” For more information contact Richter Library development officer Liliana Davidson-Tower at 305-284-4026 or ldavidsontower@miami.edu.