News: Rice VRC Featured in Rice News

In the October 12 issue of Rice News: The Faculty & Staff Newspaper of Rice University, the University’s Visual Resources Center, directed by member Mark Pompelia, was featured in the article “Art History’s Visual Resources Center Offers Bounty of Images.” Quoting from the article:

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.”

Check out the full article.