From its inception in 1883, the Department of Art and Archaeology has been collecting documentation concerning art, architecture, and material culture for research and teaching. Resources for teaching (slides and, later, digital images) were primarily managed by catalogers in the Department’s Slides and Photographs division.

Outside of their classrooms, the Department’s archaeologists created an extensive repository of notebooks, photographs, illustrations, and other materials related to the excavations and surveys they undertook; these archaeological archives have always required their own reading room and designated curator. This curator was also tasked with overseeing the large collection of photographs and other archival materials that had been collected by members of the Department throughout its hundred-year plus history. Together, these collections (the archaeological and archival) came to be managed by the Department’s Research Photographs division. Throughout the 2000s, members of this division strove to make these collections more discoverable by listing them online and making their associated images available when copyright allowed. This, along with advances in digitization techniques, launched a new wave of interest in the Department’s unique resources.

By 2010, substantial personnel overlap between those members of the Department who were managing Slides and Photographs (by this time called the Visual Resources Collection) and those who were responsible for Research Photographs rendered the distinction between the two divisions insignificant. Today, the Visual Resources staff provides assistance to faculty, staff, and students using images in their research and teaching, and manages the Department’s archaeological and archival holdings.