Teaching with Slides: The History of the Visual Resources Collection at Yale

The Visual Resources Collection at Yale remains a valuable teaching collection for art and architecture research. While the individual slides, containing mostly reproductions and slides from books, are sometimes far removed from the original--it is the collection of images that brings together the knowledge, breadth, and history of art history teaching at Yale over the years. 

In 2019, art librarians at Yale's Art Library submitted a Yale Digital Humanities Lab Rapid Prototyping Grant to reimagine the collection through digital humanities tools and concepts. The project resulted in a PixPlot project with a sampling of 300,000+ slides represented. Adding the images to this platform, new connections are formed based on visual similarities. Questions emerge through this technology such as: What can we learn from the images collected in Yale's VRC over the years?