Visual Resources Collection
106 Carpenter Hall
603-646-3758

Staff:
Janice Chapman Smarsik, Curator
of Visual Resources

Steven D. Dyer, Assistant Curator
of Visual Resources

Hours:
Monday-Friday: 8:00-12:00, 1:00-4:30

The Visual Resources Collection of the Dartmouth Art History Department consists of approximately 300,000 slides, and a growing collection of digital images.

The Visual Resource Collection is available to Dartmouth faculty members for use in their on-campus lectures,

The Art History Department Visual Resources Collection is one of the earliest academic image collections in the United States.  It began in the late 19^th century as a collection of lantern slides and study photographs of works of art and architecture.  As the 20^th century progressed, the black and white lantern slides were gradually replaced by the 35mm format and new acquisitions from copy photography or vendor purchase were mostly in color.  The quality of the architectural lantern slides, however, was so striking that many of these were re-photographed onto 35mm film in the early 1970’s.

The expansion of the Art History Department in the 1970’s and 1980’s necessitated a huge growth in the slide collection and increased professionalism in its management. Traditional strengths of the collection in American, Italian Renaissance and Ancient art and architecture continued to expand while other areas such as Medieval, Baroque, 18^th, 19^th and 20^th century European art and Non-Western art including Asian, Islamic and Oceanic were rapidly built up to meet the requirements of new courses.  Constraints of space and budget precluded extensive use and expansion of the photographic study collection. Instead slide review sessions were held in classrooms just before exams. The slide collection was extensively used by faculty members from nearly every department on campus.

The rapid advance of personal computing in the late 1980’s and Dartmouth’s strong support in this area soon benefitted the Visual Resources Collection as the curatorial staff was able to develop a database to better manage the very active collection.  As most of the slides were produced from copy photography of books in the Art Library the slide collection stands as a unique image index to much material in the library.  This has proved to be a very valuable asset in the digital age.

As Dartmouth continued to be a leader in personal computing in the 1990’s and was very early to wire all its dormitory rooms, the Visual Resources staff saw an opportunity to serve students that would be far superior to slide reviews. In 1993 the “Artemisia” image review program was inaugurated.  This brought images from specific classes over the campus network to students enrolled in those classes.  Dartmouth was one of the very first institutions to have such a program.  Slides were scanned after class and images were available to students within a day of the lecture.  Thus began the Visual Resources digital collection.

Image quality for teaching has always been one of the major concerns of the Visual Resources Collection and the faculty who use it.  It was important to all that the high quality of the slide collection not be sacrificed as the faculty moved on to teach with digital images.  Excellence of both images and projection took some time to achieve, but the results have been gratifying.

The Visual Resources Collection maintains several on-line resources for student study including the Artemisia on-line review program, the On-Line Glossary of Art Historical Terminology and a visual database of illuminated manuscripts. These programs are available only to students registered in the courses they are designed to support.