Welcome to the UNSW Virtual Slide Repository
Development of this repository was supported by a Competitive Grant from the Australian Learning & Teaching Council Ltd, an initiative of the Australian Government Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations
The repository includes virtual slide collections for Anatomy, Pathology, Botany/Ecology and Zoology (total ~600 slides). It also provides sample practical class worksheets illustrating their use in undergraduate teaching.
The repository is NOT intended to be a student access site. Its purpose is to allow course co-ordinators to browse available slides so that they can choose collections they might wish to utilise at their institution. All of the collections and worksheets are available to Australian Higher Education institutions without charge (other than a nominal fee for processing and shipment of data on a portable hard drive).
All of the virtual slides in this repository are scans of glass slides from UNSW teaching slide sets. Therefore UNSW owns the intellectual property for these resources. However, provided the source of the images is appropriately acknowledged (including by using the UNSW-branded thumbnail images as links to the virtual slide files) members of the Project Team are keen to make the virtual slides available to educators across the Australian tertiary sector. Accordingly, all image files and derivatives may be used by individuals within their own institution, but may not be used or distributed, via removable media or on the internet, without written consent. While implementation of teaching using virtual microscopy (either local availability or web-enabled access) is the responsibility of the recipient institution, members of the Project Team are able to provide on-site demonstrations/workshops to assist with planning.
Expressed another way, any higher education institution will be able to obtain from us whatever virtual slide sets it requests, the only costs involved being courier and (possibly) handling charges. We will provide advice on using virtual slides in teaching and/or run a demonstration/workshop on request, but cannot solve technical and practical issues associated with making the virtual slides available to students. There is no restriction on mounting slides from the collections on individual student machines, an internal file server, or making them available via an intranet or password-protected internet site. However, the recipient institution must undertake not to make the slides available via a publicly-accessible internet site or to supply copies of the image files to others.
For background information and papers on virtual slides and their use in learning and teaching, click here.
For sample slides and a worksheet for an integrated Anatomy/Pathology practical class, click here.
To gain access to the complete collections, click here.
