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

Helen Chillman

Slide Library, Street Hall, Yale University: Office, with catalogers desk in foreground and Helen Chillman at her desk.

Miss Chillman outside of Street Hall

Helen's job at Yale evolved with the Slides & Photos collection. With a degree in Library Science and learning as she went, she rose to the position of Slides & Photos librarian. In the days before computers were in every pocket and Google wasn't a verb, Helen was the VRC's computer. Her memory and knowledge were remarkable. She seemed to know every image in every format in the collection, and exactly where it was filed. A professor could rush into the room and ask if Helen remembered a painting with a man in the background leaning out of a window with peculiar perspective. She would think for a few seconds, walk to one of the hundreds of drawers of slides, and pull out exactly the slide required. No one else could do that, and possibly Google can't either. 

Helen's ability to know which image was needed for a professor's lecture was honed by years of attending their art history lectures and taking notes that included sketches and motifs. This was both for her own edification, and so she would know what was being discussed and what might be needed from and for the slide library. 

Helen Chillman in her Street Hall office--April 1992

Her first priority was always the professors, in particular Vince Scully. Mr. Scully's famous pointer stick was kept by Helen's desk so he could always find it. He wrote all his books in an illegible longhand, and it was Helen who translated the scrawls into typed manuscripts. She knew which slides were his favorite views, and where to find them. She had infinite patience for a brilliant mind (no matter the eccentricities), and very little for anyone she thought was dull. 

She corresponded with professors and graduate students when they travelled, helping with reference questions and research, mailing slides, receiving slides in return, and trading stories of life abroad. 

In the early days of slide collections, there were no rules or systems as to how they should be organized. Helen corresponded with visual resources professionals across the country, helping to establish standards in an evolving discipline. This doesn't mean Yale's slide & photo collection was without quirks, since it catered to an occasionally eccentric group of professors. A large cabinet was devoted to mounted photos used by Robert Farris Thompson, and the organization was a mystery to everyone but Thompson, who would root through them happily. Even in the regular collection, there was a slide drawer that contained a peculiar miscellany labelled "Gumbo Mud" where slides whose subjects fit no category at all were kept. 

Helen at the Arts Library's Slide Room, early 2000s

By the end of her career, she had been thanked in countless art history books by countless art historians and architects. When the painful transition to digital collections began, it was clear that the human interactions that Helen enjoyed so much were going to be fewer. She loved to work with intelligent, interesting people, and found the internet a poor substitute. 

She retired in 2010, having been an advocate, guide, helpmeet, and fixture for generations of art historians.