The last decade has seen an explosion in the number and scope of wide-field surveys. The data provided by these surveys will greatly increase our understanding of the relationships between the outskirts and the cluster centers and the field. I summarize the status of current deep-wide optical surveys and describe the plans for the next generations of surveys, with particular emphasis on the applications of these surveys to weak gravitational lensing. As a concrete example of such a survey, I will present results from the Deep Lens Survey (DLS).To search for other articles by the author(s) go to: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abstract_service.html