Teaching with Slides: The History of the Visual Resources Collection at Yale
Collections
Yale's Visual Resources Collections now includes more than 370,000 slides, both lantern and 35mm, and over 180,000 mounted photographs and postcards covering subjects primarily related to art history and architecture. Many of the images in the Visual Resources Collection are scans from books, slides or reproductions.
Lantern slides were both heavy and fragile, and were kept in wooden slide boxes when faculty worked with them.
Sampling of lantern slides in the Visual Resources Collection. These continued to be used after the advent of 35mm slides because they were sometimes the only available photo of a painting or site, and the film was very high resolution.
35mm slides were often contained in small slide boxes for transportation. This protected them from dust and getting lost.
A sampling of 35mm slides from the Visual Resources Collection. The red dots were placed in the lower left corner of the image, and made it easy to load them into a carousel so they'd display right side up.
When 35mm film was first used for slides, VRC staff sandwiched each frame between two thin pieces of glass and taped the edges. Later, prefabricated GEPE mounts made this process simpler.
Until around the early 2000s, Yale faculty who were teaching architecture and art history courses relied on slides from the Visual Resources Collection as a key part of their lectures. The slide viewers (pictured below) assisted faculty in making sequencing decisions for presentation order.
Slide Library, Street Hall, Yale University : Faculty working at a light table in 1973.
Slide sorter used to organize slides in the right order for a class lecture.
This small slide viewer had a magnifying lens that allowed faculty a detailed look at a 35mm slide without the use of a projector or screen.
Prior to class, faculty or teaching assistants would add the slides in the correct order to a slide carousel. A slide projector was used during class lectures to showcase the slides relevant to course materials. If the image wasn't reproduced in the class textbooks, a student might not be able to see it anywhere but in class.
Kodak slide carousels were loaded before class, with each slide's red dot visible so the images would be right side up and forwards.
The slide carousel was loaded onto a slide projector (pictured), then projected onto a screen to display photographs during class lectures. Two projectors had to be used for side-by-side comparisons, and if lantern slides were also part of the lecture, three projectors might be necessary.