The original home of the Department of Art and Archaeology.
1882
Alan Marquand owns a small collection of photographs at the founding of the Department.
1890
A gift from Adolphe Braun, his photographs of drawings and paintings by Old Masters, is the Department's first large acquisition of photographs.
1937
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.
1939
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
Labels for slides are now typed instead of handwritten in ink.
1973
The East Asian Slide Collection is transferred to Slides and Photographs.
1978
35mm carousel slide projectors come to replace single-feed projectors.
1983
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
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, 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 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
The Visual Resources Association introduces Core 1, the first standard for the structure of data fields used to describe images.
2002
Slides and Photographs comes to be renamed Visual Resources to reflect the change in work.
2004
ARTstor, an extensive digital image resource for educational and scholarly use, is launched as Kodak discontinues production of their 35mm carousel slide projectors.
2011
Over 130,000 departmental digital images are accessible via Almagest and ARTstor. Visual Resources supports classroom teaching using these two databases, and PowerPoint.
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
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.
M22 Amazon Hunting Yakto Villa. The Excavation of Antioch-on-the-Orontes Collection. A-008602.
2016
Members of the VR team begin the re-digitization of about 7,000 photographs from Princeton's Excavations of Antioch-on-the-Orontes Collection.
Find Number: 5894-G180. The Excavation of Antioch-on-the-Orontes Collection. A-009546.
2017
Members of the VR team begin to digitize the find cards from Princeton's Excavations of Antioch-on-the-Orontes Collection.
The Excavation of Antioch-on-the-Orontes digital archive, built using Omeka-S.
2018
The first website that showcased archival materials from Princeton's Antioch-on-the-Orontes Collection is launched.
Hand colored lantern slide. View of Vaarlam monastery (seen from the Great Meteoron), Meteora. 1929 Mount Athos Expedition Collection. A-018940.
2019
A 33-minute film documenting the 1929 expedition to Mt. Athos, discovered in a barrel in the department and digitized a few years earlier, was viewed publicly for the first time.
2020
IIIF used for the first time to deliver images directly into Canvas for courses taught by faculty in the Department of Art & Archaeology.
Kurt Weitzman assisting Fred Anderegg in photographing an icon at Mt. Sinai. Unpublished.
2023
The Sinai Digital Archive, under the leadership of VR Director Julia Gearhart and Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Tufts University, Alice Sullivan, received the Digital Humanities and Multimedia Studies Prize from the Medieval Academy of America. This annual award recognizes an outstanding digital research project in Medieval Studies.