From Professor Steven Moga- "The Visual Library for Landscape Studies is a resource for Smith College students, staff, and faculty. It is designed as a provocation to challenge conventional thinking about landscape and an invitation to play, work, research, investigate, and reflect on landscape.

The primary goal of this project is to enhance access to high quality images that are organized around the key concepts that inform landscape studies. That is, a specialized visual database that is thematic, rather than organized around the name of a specific designer, site, geographic location, time period, or design movement. These images are intended for use in making comparisons *across* those categories, for catalyzing project ideas, for broadening awareness of possible sites and cases, and for sparking creative new endeavors. They include a mix of historical and contemporary images, primarily photographs.  

This collection of images will reflect Smith’s liberal arts orientation, extending in directions that are unlikely to be found in, for instance, a visual database used by students and faculty in a landscape architecture program in a school of architecture or design. It deviates from a purely landscape history mode of curation in that it embraces the vernacular, the unnamed and unplanned, and the everyday aspects of the built environment as it is experienced. It may include renderings, aerial photographs, and other evidence of significant or historic works of landscape design, but it will not be the focus of collecting.

Images come from three sources: they are drawn from existing resources, already scanned and available in the larger database of works used primarily by students and faculty in Art; scanned images that are uploaded; and photographs made by students and faculty in Landscape Studies.
 

A secondary goal of the project is to stimulate scholarly conversation about landscape studies as a field characterized by many disciplinary approaches and methods. Landscape is defined by the interaction of nature and natural processes, built environment, and human communities. Happy exploring!"

A list of helpful field guides for identifying landscapes & built environments.