Take a historic campus tour from your couch

A new online tour of the University of Chicago campus allows visitors to view select campus residence halls and classroom buildings as they were in decades past, while simultaneously seeing that location as it appears today.  The campus tour, created by Special Collections staff and using the social media site HistoryPin, features dozens of images from the Special Collections Research Center’s Photographic Archive.  Each image is then mapped to a current-day Google Street Map location.  Viewers have the option to use the “fade” control to fade the historical image into the background or bring it forward. 

This historic campus tour is the second such virtual tour created in Special Collections, the first being a tour of iconic sights of Chicago, inspired by the postcards in the Ian Mueller Collection of Chicago Memorabilia.  The Chicago city postcard tour was curated by the Special Collections archives and manuscripts unit staff, and  launched at the same time the exhibition, “Souvenirs! Get Your Souvenirs!” opened in the Special Collections Exhibition Gallery.  The physical exhibition runs July 22- October 5, 2013.  View the postcard tour  online.