The Knowlton School Digital Library

The Knowlton School archives' mission is to document and preserve a record of student work, course materials, and school documentation.  This digital library provides a virtual access point to many of those items to support and highlight the ongoing legacy of the Knowlton School at The Ohio State University. 

This media resource library primarily supports the Architecture, Landscape Architecture, City and Regional Planning sections and related curricula and research at the Knowlton School. Contents of the Library currently include over 34,000 multimedia files, including digitized faculty work, original student projects, design plans, and images documenting the numerous events and exhibitions at Knowlton School. 

The Digital Library was funded in 2000 by a TELR (now Learning Technology) grant and contributions from the Knowlton School of Architecture. It is also privately supported by the Knowlton School of Architecture Digital Library Fund established by Frank Elmer (Knowlton School of Architecture class of 1967) and Ruth Gless, founding partners in Lincoln Street Studio, Columbus.





 

History

The first version of the Digital Library was developed in 2001 by Ohio State's Web Media Collective, a campus-wide effort to share media assets through a virtual library infrastructure. Staff and student employees developed the second version of the library in Drupal and launched it from Knowlton servers in February 2011. Bringing it in-house enabled the Digital Library to better interface with other parts of the Knowlton web presence, such as the main website. Version three went live in August 2013, with numerous progressive enhancements to date.  During the summer of 2024 the site was rebuilt to better serve accessibility needs.
 

Collection and Cataloging Method

Student work selected for the archive is curated through a nomination process completed by the studio faculty at the end of each semester.  Students are given the opportunity to describe and upload their work and submit the physical model for in-house photography.  The metadata gathered to contextualize the student work is primarily captured directly from the student with minimal editing and oversight. 
 

Rights Summary

All work published on this database is intended exclusively for educational purposes and to contribute to public knowledge. All authors—including students, faculty, and photographers—retain copyrights to their works published in this database. The Archive makes every effort to contact all authors whose work is held in the Collection. If you are an author and the Archive has not contacted you, please contact Amber Bales 
 

STAFF
Amber Bales
Knowlton School Archivist
bales.94@osu.edu
275 W Woodruff Ave
Columbus, OH 43210