facilities
Art and Art History
 

Art History    .    Design  .    Studio Art    .    Visual Art Studies + Art Education

Visual Resources Collection

General Information

The Visual Resources Collection (VRC) is a teaching resources unit for faculty and students of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. Its mission is to support the teaching needs of the Art and Art History Department.

Slides continue to be used in classroom teaching. However, the use of digital images is becoming rapidly the preferred format. The Visual Resources Collection has been producing high quality digital TIFF images since 2004. As of September 2008, circa 33,400 digital JPEG images are accessible via the Digital Archive SErvices (DASE), a password protected site.

The VRC also participated in the licensing of the Archivision (Art and Architecture) Collection and the Allan T. Kohl Archive. Both of these collections are accessible through DASE. In cooperation with the Blanton Museum, the VRC is in the process of making the museum's holdings digitally accessible on DASE for classroom teaching.

The Slide Collection, which began around 1940, currently numbers approximately 550,000 35mm analog slides of which circa 218,648 have been entered into a database. Currently, these text records are not available on-line. Electronic access to these text records is only possible in the VRC room.

The Collection also houses the Ferguson Collection that consists of over 5000 photographs, negatives, and contact sheets of Mayan sites in Central America.

Location and Hours

The Visual Resources Collection is located in the Doty Fine Arts Building (DFA) room 2.210. Hours are Mondays through Fridays, 8:00AM – 5:00PM; Phone 512-471-4337.

Facilities Information

The collection is housed in a large space with study carrels, light tables, circulation desk as well as space for staff. Technical processing is done in adjacent rooms which include copy stand equipment for analog as well as digital photography, two stations with slide and flatbed scanners. The location, one floor below the Fine Arts Library, provides convenient access to an extensive reference collection available to support the research needs of the collection staff.