J. E.(Jed) and Bonnie McClellan © California Academy of Sciences
Manzanita Project History
J. E.(Jed) and Bonnie
McClellan © California Academy of Sciences
Use Information: Personal Use | Educational Use | Non-profit Use | Commercial Use
Project Information: Manzanita Project History | CalPhotos | Contributions | Invitation to Photographers | Annotations
The Manzanita Project began in 1995 from a bequest given to the California Academy of Sciences Library by Frances Iden. Frances had been a dedicated volunteer and donor to the Academy Library's Special Collections. The Manzanita Project's primary goal was to increase access to the Academy's rich image collection in Special Collections. In the first phase of the Project, we scanned California plant and animal images and then created an internal image database. We soon realized our need for help with the technical aspects of accessing these images from the web and this began our partnership with the University of California, Berkeley Digital Library Project.
The CalPhotos' system at Berkeley now provides all the technical expertise, computer hardware and software, database programming, and storage to house the Academy's Manzanita Project's images and the thousands of other digital images from state agencies, non-profit organizations, and individual photographers. The CalPhotos' system has over 49,000 images of plants, animals, cultures, and people and habitats. Eighteen thousand images from around the world have been contributed by the Manzanita Project and our contribution increases yearly.
CalPhotos has seen a dramatic increase in the average number of daily users from 3,881 in 2000 to 14,929 in 2002. Today we reach users around the world providing images for a vast array of projects, from University research webpages, to government agency reports, to museum and park signage, and numerous nonprofits and community group projects. We also supply images for a variety of commercial publications.
In addition our images at CalPhotos, the Manzanita Project is developing an internal database of images for the Academy staff scientists, exhibits and marketing departments to use. This database, using Canto's Cumulus software, is available only on the Academy's Intranet. If you are at the Academy, you can access the database.