The "Urbana Schools, Past and Present" photograph set on the Urbana Free Library Digital Collections Flickr account allows patrons to view a visual history of the schools in the city of Urbana. This set can be accessed at the following link: https://www.flickr.com/photos/98945443@N05/sets/72157634670405336/.
The collection includes photographs of the school buildings as well as students who attended the schools. All of the Urbana schools represented in the Champaign County Historical Archives photograph collection are present in the Flickr set, but the set is only a sample of the school photographs held in the CCHA. If you are interested in seeing more school photographs, stop by the Champaign County Historical Archives on the second floor of the Urbana Free Library!
One neat feature of Flickr is that it allows you to view the locations of images on a current map. At the following link, you will find a map with dots indicating the locations of the photographs in the "Urbana Schools, Past and Present" set: https://www.flickr.com/photos/98945443@N05/sets/72157634670405336/map/
Thumbnails of the photographs appear in a line at the bottom of the map. When you click on a dot on the map, the images associated with that location will be emphasized by graying out other images, and enlarging the first image for the chosen location.
If you click on a thumbnail image along the bottom, the location will be indicated by a white border around the pink dot on the map for the correct location.
Not all of the images are displayed on the map at the same time. By clicking the blue arrows at the left and right ends of the line of thumbnails, you can move through the images.
Whether in the map view or the photo view, clicking on any photograph will enlarge it, and provide the description below the image. When viewing a single image, you can scroll through the set by using the white arrows that appear on the left and right sides of the photograph.
Each photograph is tagged with key phrases. When viewing photographs, you can click on a tag to view all of the photograph in the Urbana Free Library Digital Collection that have that tag. For example, the following link will take you to the page showing the photographs that have the tag "students": https://www.flickr.com/search/?q=students&w=98945443@N05&adv=1&mt=all&ct=6&m=tags.
The Urbana Free Library Digital Collections on Flickr will continue to grow in the future with more images from the CCHA, as well as other departments in the Urbana Free Library.