UCSB Gets Photo Trove Worth $14.3M

The University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) Davidson Library has received a major collection of more than 500,000 aerial images, offering “a pictorial odyssey” of some 65 major metropolitan areas in the United States at the turn of the 21st century. The collection, donated to UCSB by Pacific Western Aerial Surveys of Santa Barbara, is valued at more than $14.3 million. Larry Carver, director of the Map and Imagery Laboratory (MIL) at Davidson, where the collection will be housed, said the Citipix Collection is “unparalleled in size, focus, and resolution.”

The images were taken by I.K. Curtis Services, Inc., between 1999 and 2002. The collection consists of original film negatives and images digitized by Kodak. “As a landscape is altered over time, mosaics of such photographs become a valuable resource for geologists tracing earthquake faults, biologists, historians, archaeologists, land use planners, engineers, attorneys settling property disputes, pollution monitoring, and public health officials tracking disease vectors,” noted UCSB university librarian Brenda Johnson.