CalPhotos About the Alfred Brousseau Project   
 

  • Overview
  • About Brother Alfred Brousseau
  • About the Alfred Brousseau Project


  • Overview

    This collection contains over 12,500 35mm photographs of about 2000 species of California wildflowers, fungi, trees, and other plants taken between 1925 and 1988 by Brother Alfred Brousseau F.S.C. (1908-1988).

    Brother Eric Vogel, F.S.C. (1927-2000) of St. Mary's College in Moraga, California collected the Brousseau slides and made them available to the public beginning in 1995; online access is provided as part of the U.C. Berkeley Digital Library Project. This project has also linked individual photos to other botanical information about the plant, where known, via the CalFlora Database.

    Production costs for digitizing the Brousseau images were funded in part by the Digital Library Project and by the State of California Department of Water Resources.

    About the Alfred Brousseau Project

    Brother Alfred Brousseau, F.S.C. (1908-1988) produced a collection of 35mm color slides of Native Wildflowers of California which consists of over 12,500 slides of over 2,000 species. The object of the project is to produce a comprehensive, organized and widely disseminated database of native California flora. Since the project is a not-for-profit effort, donations are welcome to help defray the ongoing production costs.

    The first output of the project was in the form of CD-ROM's containing over 2,000 pictures of 665 species of flowers. These pictures were scanned and saved as 8 bit PICT and 8 bit TIFF files for the digital archives.The next project was scanning all 12,500 images into Kodak's Photo-CD format, which uses 24-bit color in five resolutions ranging from 128x192 pixels to 2048x3072 pixels. This project was completed in January 1997 and the images were made available via a searchable database by the Berkeley Digital Library Project.

    Information on ordering a CD-ROM containing the Brousseau Collection images

    In order to support this not-for-profit effort, Brother Eric Vogel (1927-2000) of St. Mary's College prepared a CD-ROM from photographs in the Brousseau Collection. The CD-ROM, a collection of low resolution [384x256] scans, contains 300 images of High Sierra scenery, 500 images of trees of California (full trees, branches, seed pods, etc.), 900 images of mushrooms and fungi of the North Coast of California, and 11,300 images of the Wildflowers of California.

    The cost of the CD-ROM is $25, postage and handling included. Proceeds are used to continue to administer, curate, and widely disseminate Brother Alfred Brousseau's images.

    For more information, contact the Saint Mary's College of California Archives.

    CD-ROM details

    There are several versions of the CD-ROM, which can be obtained in HTML, IBM-PC (MS Windows) and Macintosh formats, respectively.

    The HTML version of the Brousseau Collection contains the complete colllection of images described above and can be accessed by any graphic web browser such as Netscape or Internet Explorer. Navigation from the Home Page is done by clicking on the various buttons found there.

    The IBM-PC (MS Windows) version contains TIFF file format (8 bit, 256 colors) pictures of the same flowers as the Macintosh version, but now grouped according to Botanical Family. Text files containing information about the flowers including the Latin Name, Family Name, Common Name, as well as information as to the date and place of picture taking. There are also indexes by Family Name, Latin Name and Common Name.

    The Macintosh version contains standalone Supercard files of the flowers arranged in alphabetical order by Latin Name. Each card contains information about the flowers (including Latin Name, Family Name, Common Name, as well as information as to date and place of picture taking) as well as a button to access the full screen picture of the flower (PICT file format; 8 bit, 256 colors). Text files are available which present indexes for the flowers. (Indexed by Family Name, Latin Name, and Common Name)

    Note that all images from the Brousseau Collection are the intellectual property of Saint Mary's College and their fair use should follow the conventional citation protocol. The citation should read: "©Br. Alfred Brousseau, Saint Mary's College." Permission to use is granted freely to not-for-profit organizations and for a per-image fee for commercial use.

    For publications and other graphic applications, high resolution [1024x1536] electronic images are available in JPEG and TIFF formats. Click here for information.


    CalPhotos is a project of BNHM   University of California, Berkeley

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    this page last updated: Dec 16, 2017