History
The Visual Resource Collection dates to 1885, the first year an art curriculum was offered at Wellesley College. Plaster casts were used for study purposes as well as professional study prints during the early part of the 20th century. The VRC currently houses over 100,000 study prints that were used exclusively for student study as recently as 1970. Later, large format lantern slides were used to project images in classrooms. The VRC continues to house an extensive collection of lantern slides in the areas of architecture and painting, some still used in classrooms today. With the advent of carousel projectors in the late 1950s the 35 mm slide collection has continued to grow and is the most heavily circulated part of the collection. In 2006 the collection consists of over 350,000 35 mm slides that cover such diverse topics as modern African photography to Gothic metalwork. The library moved to its present location on the third floor of Jewett in 1974 when the Davis Museum became the new home to the College Art Museum. Recently, the VRC has moved into the production of digital images and in Fall 2006 launched a digital image database, MDID (Madison Digital Image Database).