The Digital Images and Slide Collection at Harvard College’s Fine Arts Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts, houses more than 750,000 images in 35-millimeter-slide and digital formats. Visitors can scrutinize details of a fireplace in the 1885 Edward Ayer Residence in Chicago, or a 17th-century Turkish carpet from the Ottoman period, its intricate star pattern eaten by time.

Until recently, the collection was tucked into the basement of the Fogg Museum, on campus. But when the building at 32 Quincy Street that housed both the Fogg and Busch-Reisinger museums closed for renovation in 2008, the slide collection needed a new, dedicated home of its own. Harvard chose the basement of the Sackler Museum as the new location, even though the dark, rough space was less than ideal for browsing Wikipedia on an iPad, let alone time travel by way of a lantern slide (the earliest form of photographic slide for projection, which was developed in the 19th century).