Art History

Art History’s Visual Resources Center offers bounty of images

BY ARIE WILSON
Rice News staff

Need to illustrate a lecture on the Paleolithic Era with slides of cave drawings by Cro-Magnon man? Trying to add a visual element to a term paper on the photography of pop culture? No matter the topic, a little-known resource at Rice is waiting to assist faculty and students with their graphic needs.

JEFF FITLOW

The art history department’s Visual Resources Center maintains a traditional film-based and now increasingly digital collection of works of art and visual culture from prehistoric to contemporary times that is available as a resource for Rice faculty, staff and students.

The art history department’s Visual Resources Center maintains a traditional film-based and now increasingly digital collection of works of art and visual culture from prehistoric to contemporary times. Comprehensive in scope, the collection reflects the teaching focus of the Department of Art History over the last three decades.

Mark Pompelia, director of the Visual Resources Center, said that even though the collection was born from the needs of art history professors, it is an encompassing anthology of images that is open to Rice faculty and students for use in courses and projects.

“We like to say that we are a local department resource with university-wide ambitions,” Pompelia said.

That may be an understatement.

With the help of Kelley Vernon, associate curator, and Kathleen Hamilton, assistant curator, the three-person team is adding about 1,000 digital images each month to the approximately 350,000 slides and 15,000 digital images the center has amassed since the department and collection were founded 30 years ago.

Each image is accompanied by a full catalog record that adheres to the latest data standards in the profession.

In recent years the acquisition rates between slides and digital have reversed. Nearly all images added now are scans from slides or books or high-resolution images from a digital camera. Slide acquisitions have decreased to a trickle.

“We are really seeing a change in the number of professors who want to use digital images instead of slides,” Pompelia said. “However, the challenge is to build a critical mass of images that is meaningful to each professor in order for digital to be a viable teaching option. The fact that our digital collection is fully cataloged and searchable increases its attraction.”

Pompelia is working with Information Technology to add images acquired and cataloged by the center to the new Instructional Media Management System (IMMS), the part of OWL-Space that allows for database-driven searches of cataloged media. Searches are currently limited to images, but ultimately audio and video will be available also.

With the rolling out of IMMS, images will become accessible to any Rice user from any location that has Internet access.

The Visual Resources Center is just one collection — currently the largest — of potentially many maintained in IMMS, Pompelia said.

“IMMS has been in the pilot phase for calendar year 2006 and will be introduced in January 2007,” he said. “However, anybody who wants to use it now can do so, and a majority of art history courses have been using it successfully since this past spring semester.”

IMMS can be accessed with a valid NetID through the OWL-Space portal at <https://owlspace-ccm.rice.edu/portal>.

The new tool will complement licensed electronic databases (ARTstor, CAMIO, etc.) already available to Rice faculty, staff and students and accessible from Fondren Library’s Web site, <www.rice.edu/fondren/collections>.

For more information on art history’s Visual Resources Center, visit <http://arthistory.rice.edu/
vrc.cfm>.