History of Visual Resources

Greyscale photo of an old building behind some trees.

The original home of the Department of Art and Archaeology.

1882

Founding of the Department of Art & Archaeology

Alan Marquand owns a small collection of photographs at the founding of the Department.

1890

Adolphe Braun's Gift

A gift from Adolphe Braun, his photographs of drawings and paintings by Old Masters, is the Department's first large acquisition of photographs.

1937

The Platt Collection

About 720 albums of photographs as well as slides used for both teaching and research were given to the Department. These were transferred to the Princeton University Library in 2007.

Green pamphlet on top of yellow sheet with larger text on top of yellow sheet with smaller text.

1939

The Color Slides Cooperative

Color Slides Cooperative was launched, with aims to make color lantern slides and 35mm slides for teaching available to its member institutions (which numbered 145 by 1942). The executive committee was chaired by Princeton's Charles Rufus Morey. Lantern slides largely remained the standard until the 1950s when 35mm slides began to be widely adopted for teaching.

1952

Labeling Strategies

Labels for slides are now typed instead of handwritten in ink.

Scroll featuring mountains on the right behind trees and other landscape elements on left. Red stamps in three corners.

1973

The East Asian Slide Collection

The East Asian Slide Collection is transferred to Slides and Photographs.

Black and grey slide projector on patterned carpet

1978

Technological Advancements

35mm carousel slide projectors come to replace single-feed projectors.

Greyscale photograph with slides in a box in front of a slide projector.

1983

Striking Numbers

About 100,000 lanterns slides are still available for use in the Department, though not produced since the mid-1950s; lantern slides that circulate are copied onto 35mm film at this time.

1988

Scanning and Cataloguing

The first 35mm slide scanner (Barneyscan) is introduced. Cataloguing standards and automated systems for cataloging images were also adopted around this time. The Department also begins discussions with the Computer Center about developing a database for these slides.

1990

The Piero Project

The Piero Project, developed by Marilyn Arnberg Lavin, Kirk Alexander (B.A. 1972), and Kevin Perry (Ph.D. 1986), is the first interactive art historical database at Princeton.

Slides and Photographs develops its first image management database.

1995

Almagest Launched

Almagest is launched at Princeton. This relational database provides tools to display images on computer via the Internet, allowing students to study images for their art history courses online instead of looking at mounted photographs. This shift from teaching with slides to teaching with digital images marks a monumental transition for the Department. The Noli database of Professor John Pinto is an early Almagest project.

1996

New Data Standards

The Visual Resources Association introduces Core 1, the first standard for the structure of data fields used to describe images.

The Visual Resources logo featuring orange text on a white background; V/R Visual Resources

2002

Name Change

Slides and Photographs comes to be renamed Visual Resources to reflect the change in work.

Boxes forming logo above the word ARTSTOR.

2004

ARTstor Launched

ARTstor, an extensive digital image resource for educational and scholarly use, is launched as Kodak discontinues production of their 35mm carousel slide projectors.

2011

Service Oriented

Over 130,000 departmental digital images are accessible via Almagest and ARTstor. Visual Resources supports classroom teaching using these two databases, and PowerPoint.

Three men, forward facing, wearing elaborate outfits on gold background.

George, Theodore Stratelates, and Demetrius. By permission of Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai, Egypt. Photograph courtesy of Michigan-Princeton-Alexandria Expeditions to Mount Sinai.

2015

Sinai Website Launched

In collaboration with The University of Michigan, the first website dedicated to sharing materials related to the Michigan-Princeton-Alexandria Expeditions to Mount Sinai, a research project focused on the vast collections of icons, manuscripts, liturgical objects, and archival material from the Monastery of Saint Catherine, was launched. Revised in 2020, this ongoing project was awarded the Digital Humanities and Multimedia Studies Prize from The Medieval Academy of America in 2023.