Art

Jacques-Louis David, "The Sabine Women" (detail) 1796-99

Denison University is a small, private liberal art university located in Granville, Ohio, 30 miles east of Columbus. The student population is around 2,000. The Slide Library was established in the late 1960s by Professor Horace King, who began purchasing slides and having them made by copy photography to enhance his art appreciation courses.

Denison University's Slide Library includes a collection of approximately 150,000 35-mm slides as well as approximately 40,000 digital images.  New slides are no longer being added to the collection, but the existing slides are being digitized, cataloged and added to the campus database at the rate of approximately 1,000 per month.  The digital collection can be found (on campus only) at content.denison.edu.

The Art History Program at Denison has three full-time faculty members.  The Studio Art Program has five full-time faculty. The art history faculty are the primary users of the collection, though there has been an increase in studio faculty use. Faculty members from other departments and students who are doing classroom presentations are increasingly utilizing the online collection.

The majority of the slides were acquired through in-house copy photography or commercial vendors.  The digital collections continues to be developed in much the same way.  Both collections represent images of paintings, sculpture, architecture, textile arts, maps and nonwestern art including Japanese, Indian, Chinese, African, Southeast Asian, Middle Eastern, and Oceanic. There is a rapidly expanding contemporary art section which includes performance and video art.

The slide collection is cataloged by medium, by period and country, then also alphabetically by artists name or architect for all art from the Seventeenth Century and before. Eighteenth, Nineteenth, Twentieth, and Twenty-first Century art is arranged alphabetically by artist, combining the mediums of painting, graphics, minor arts, sculpture, multimedium and performance.

Slides are no longer circulated outside of the Art Department as most images can be found online either through the Art Department database or the use of ARTstor.

For more information on using the slide collection please call (740) 587-6480.

Staff
Visual Resource Curator, Jacqueline Pelasky, can be reached at hout@denison.edu

Hours
Monday - Friday 8:00 - 4:00; closed Saturdays and Sundays, and June through mid-August. Limited hours during regularly scheduled Denison University vacations.

Location
The Art Department Slide Library is temporarily located on the third floor of Chamberlin Lodge. This building is on the northern residential quad at 900 North Loop.

Collection Development Policy
The mission of the Slide Library is to serve as a broad, under-graduate level teaching collection, with emphasis on the Art History and Studio curriculum and specializations of the faculty. The primary function is to develop and maintain a collection of visual images to support classroom teaching in the art department. Special effort is made to assure that all materials are of the best possible quality, that they are maintained in a manner conducive to longevity, and that they are organized/cataloged in an accurate and consistent manner to provide logical access.

As an autonomous and highly specialized collection, the Slide Library functions independently of the main campus library. The collection does not circulate in the same manner as their collection, nor do we participate in resource sharing or inter-library loan.

Selection of Materials

Selection of materials for the collection is the responsibility of the Visual Resource Curator. Items are added to the collection (1) to fill gaps or enhance a specific area as determined by the Visual Resource Curator, (2) to support classes being taught in the art department,  (3) to replace old, deteriorated or lost items.

In order to comply with copyright regulations, all images made available by Denison University Art Department or by the Slide LIbrary must be used for educational purposes only, i.e. for research, classroom lectures, and reports or presentations. Copyright restrictions must be closely observed in order to protect both the Art Department and the university.