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About Verle Kaiser
About the Photo Archive
 

Welcome to the online version of the Verle Kaiser photo archive!  The images contained here represent a small proportion of the photograph collection donated to Washington State University Libraries by Kaiser after his retirement.  The  photographs and slides themselves are housed in WSU's Manuscripts, Archives and Special Collections (MASC) as collection 'PC-71'. 

Kaiser's documentation of soil erosion was instrumental in bringing awareness of the problem to the public eye, and developing practices that would decrease soil erosion.

The main objective of this site is to make this collection more accessible to the public.  To this end, we have developed a searchable database of several hundred of the photographs contained in the collection.  Our long-term goal, funding permitting, is to digitize the entire archive. At this time searches can be made on subject, date, location,  photographer, as well as any one of several keywords (more on that on the search page).   At this time, we have focused on five main subjects: erosion, conservation practices,  equipment,  people and places of local interest, and flooding.

Searching the database:
Currently searchable keywords include: erosion, rill erosion, gully erosion, summer fallow, winter wheat, and many others.  If you leave the search field blank, you will get a listing of all of the photos in the small test database that is currently on line.  Don't worry - the final searching will be more user friendly, and there were will be many more images (target is about 500 for this initial effort).   For now, we want you to at least get a feel for what is coming.

Image display
Our final setup will allow the user to see a series of thumbnail images of the search results, and a higher resolution (approximately 800x600) image that will be loaded along with the text information that goes with it.  For example, the date, location, photographer, original caption, etc.  We'd also like to have an intermediate size image that will load more quickly than the 800x600 version, but that is under development.  In the meantime, only the thumbnail and  800x600 versions are available (and the 800x600 version loads slowly if you are on a modem!).  The caption that appears under the 800x600 image contains the information present on the photograph itself, plus in some cases additional comments that we've added based on our knowledge of soil conservation efforts and issues.

This site was developed through a grant from the Verle Kaiser Foundation, in conjunction with the Department of Crop and Soil Sciences, College of Agriculture and Home  Economics, and MASC. 

Final note: We are currently developing this site.  We would not yet call it pretty, but it is functional (though currently it contains only a small subset of the images).  At this time, the database searching is possible.  Check it out!  If you have suggestions while we finish developing the site, please contact us - we welcome your feedback. Please return to examine future enhancements.