The University of South Carolina, Thomas Cooper Library's Map Library houses the majority of the South Carolina Aerial photos, 130,000 images, from 1938 - 1980s. The photos are highly used by developers and planners around and even out of the state, resulting in many of them falling apart.

This pilot project consists of a very small portion of the aerial photo collection, approximately 360 images, focusing just on Columbia, SC for the dates of 1938, 1959-60, 1971, and 1980. If this project is successful, outside funding will be sought to continue adding images to the online collection.

The aerial photos originally came from a few different government agencies. The majority are from a set of aerial photographs from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Farm Service Agency (formerly the ASCS - Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service). These have been acquired from the USDA State Office since the mid-1960s, in a program set up by Dr. Richard G. Silvernail, former chair, USC Geography Department. These photographs cover every county in South Carolina from 1930s - 1980s, in seven to ten year intervals, with several sets missing due to previous disposal by the county agencies. These number over 100,000 photographs.

In addition, each county has been required to update their aerial photographs for tax mapping, every ten years, since the mid-1970s. These are contracted separately from the USDA photographs. The Map Library has photographs and Mylar negatives for Richland and Lexington Counties. Due to space restrictions, other county photographs have not been collected.

The U.S. Geological Survey has a program for aerial photographs for the production of their topographic maps. The set for South Carolina is held by the S.C. Land Resources Commission. They recently closed their public office and will consider dividing their set of USGS photographs with the Map Library.

There are miscellaneous private and public agencies that produce occasional photographs as well, but this is very small in comparison to the USDA and SC county planning commissions.

In general, there are 3 sizes of photographs - contact prints at 9" x 9", enlargements at 12" x 12", and large at 24" x 24." There are a few 36" x 36." The number of photographs in a particular county set depends on the size of the county and the scale of the photographs. Prior to 1970 the scale was 1:20,000 and later sets are 1:40,000, or 4 times the area on the same size piece of paper. Thus, items are 4 times smaller on the 1:40,000 photographs.

The Map Library continues to collect aerial photos and is planning to acquire the 1990s photographs, when they come available.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Ross Taylor and David McQuillan of the Map Library provided the aerial photos and helped a lot in explaining how the photos are accessed and used. David McQuillan provided most of the information to write the background about the collection. Lauren Glaettli (MLIS, 2005) scanned the images for this pilot project in the summer of 2005. She used a UMAX PowerLook 2100XL scanner and created TIFFs at 300ppi. Lauren also created brief metadata and Kate Boyd loaded the images and metadata into the CONTENTdm database. In the Fall of 2005, Phu Nguyen (MLIS, 2005) began the creation of the web pages to accompany and make the images in the database accessible through image mapping. Laura Coleman (MLIS, 2006) created the look of the web site and Laura Masce (MLIS, 2006) finished creating the html pages in the Spring of 2006.

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