Contact Details

Visual Resources Center
Department of Art History, Rice University
6100 Main St, 103 Herring Hall
Email: vrc@rice.edu
Web site: arthistory.rice.edu/vrc.cfm

Scope

The Visual Resources Center (VRC) is the image collection for art historical instruction and research at Rice University. Containing approximately 325,000 35mm film slides and 10,000 high-resolution digital images, the collection represents visual culture from prehistoric to contemporary times and reflects the many areas of faculty interest and curatorial development since its inception in the early 1970s.

Staff

The VRC has three FTE staff (a director and associate and assistant curators—the first two being professional, exempt positions). In addition, a student assistant contributes 10-15 hours per week.

Acquisitions

The VRC currently has an annual acquisitions rate of 4,000 35mm slides and 12,000 digital images through in-house copystand photography and flatbed and slide scanning, which signals a recent and dramatic reversal of the ratio of analog to digital items added to the collection. This change reflects the developing interest of the art history faculty toward electronic access and presentation and VRC efforts to build a significant and meaningful body of digital images to make that format attractive to the faculty. The university is currently in the process of negotiating a license for ARTstor, which will greatly impact digital image access and possibly affect VRC internal collection development practices.

Data Environment

In 2003, the VRC implemented the Image Resource Information System (IRIS), a highly complex relational database developed by a consortium of colleges and universities that adheres to the latest developments in visual resources data standards (key among them is the work/image relationship, where multiple image records refer to one work record). IRIS also encourages the construction of and strict adherence to a wide variety of built-in authority files. Before IRIS, the VRC had been using a fairly adequate flat-file to produce slide labels for 75,000 slides; this file is searchable through IRIS. The VRC is looking to modify IRIS to add thumbnails to image records and to create an OPAC (online catalog) for patron searching of IRIS.

Digital Instruction

Since 2000, the VRC has supported course-based Web sites for student review of images. These sites are generated through third-party software such as Extensis Portfolio and Microsoft Powerpoint (the former offers a data-rich image gallery, whereas as the latter allows a seamless review of the actual lecture presented in class). In summer 2005, the university reviewed several digital image management systems and decided upon the Madison Digital Image Database (MDID), an intuitive teaching tool that allows faculty to search the VRC digital collection and build lectures to be presented in class and saved for student review online. The VRC spent the autumn building a metadata model and selecting the corresponding data fields within IRIS (exported data is then modified slightly before being imported to MDID). The VRC envisions a further streamlined digital workflow between these two systems, IRIS and MDID, to allow for near real-time access to digital images.