The Visual Resources Center (VRC) supports History of Art scholars in the areas of digital teaching, image research, 3D modeling, audiovisual support, and copyright permissions. In addition, the VRC can provide consultation regarding image formats, publication guidelines, image metadata, and digital collections management for image-centered projects. Contact the VRC staff during public service hours to speak with a digital image specialist.
Image Offerings
The VRC builds and maintains an image collection for instructional research purposes. The VRC collection of 70,000 images of art and architecture is hosted through ARTstor. The ARTstor Digital Library is a subscription database of almost two million images of art and architecture from around the world, ranging from prehistory to the present. The ARTstor Digital Library and the VRC collection can be accessed by all UCB-affiliated faculty, staff, and students.
Training and Assistance
The VRC staff is available to assist instructors and students in using local and subscription image databases, utilizing search strategies and best practices for finding images, and operating image presentation and manipulation software such as PowerPoint, ARTstor’s OIV, and Photoshop.
The VRC also also offers trainings on an individual basis to small groups. Trainings can cover topics such as ARTstor batch download, use of PowerPoint tools, digital photography, and using the Europeana digital museum portal.
Digital Resources Guide
The VRC website offers a comprehensive digital resources guide to help students and faculty with finding museum sites, online image resources, using ARTstor, and downloading useful apps for image presentation and manipulation. The resources guide also features a list of digital humanities projects related to art and art history, including 3D representations, time webs, maps, and macrophotography.
Collaboration with Digital Humanities at Berkeley
The VRC is currently working on several digital humanities collaborations, including projects supported by Digital Humanities at Berkeley, such as DH Fellow and Art History Professor Lisa Trever’s undergraduate course, History of Art 192L: Mural Painting and the Ancient Americas.
For this course, VRC staff will offer students training in photography techniques and equipment, image post-processing, metadata creation, online publishing, and guidance in creating 3D digital reconstructions of archaeological sites.
In addition, the VRC is collaborating with DH Fellow and Art History Professor Elizabeth Honig to develop an Open Catalogue Raisonné Platform for building and sharing digital catalogue raisonnés, resources that detail an artist’s oeuvre and provide evidence of the provenance of the artist’s works. This work, supported by a DH at Berkeley collaborative research grant, builds upon a Drupal reformulation of the Brueghel Family Wiki Project.