The UT Libraries Visual Resources Collection (VRC) is now available for viewing on Artstor. This guide has been developed for all UT Austin faculty, students and staff to help you find and organize the VRC images on the Artstor site, but first, what is the VRC and what is Artstor?
The Visual Resources Collection (VRC) is a digital collection of over 100,000 images of art, architecture and design formed for the purposes of teaching and research. The digital images found here are the result of image requests from faculty and students in the Department of Art and Art History; collection development work, especially of non-Western art; and images from art collections and exhibitions across the UT Campus. See the Visual Resources Collection LibGuide for more information about the VRC Collection.
Artstor is a huge and growing resource of digital images of art, architecture, the humanities and the sciences. Museums, libraries, archives and scholars from all over the world have contributed to this non-profit site for the purpose of providing images for education and research. Artstor contains various kinds of collections including: The Artstor Digital Library of 2.5 million+ images from over 300 institutions; Institutional Collections, like the VRC Collection; Public Collections of some 1.3 million open access images, videos, audio files and documents; and Personal Collections made up of users' own collections of images from other sources.
The VRC's images are on Artstor as an Institutional Collection named "The University of Texas - Art and Art History Visual Resources Collection". What that means is that UT Libraries, along with other institutions, have placed their images on the Artstor site for the use of their own faculty, students and staff. You will not see the holdings of other institutions' collections on Artstor unless the institutions have made their collections public. The decision to move the VRC Collection to Artstor was made to ensure that the images from this collection would continue to be available online after the VRC's current UT host, DASE (Digital Archive Services), is no longer available. And with this move, the VRC will benefit from Artstor's platform which provides quick PowerPoint downloads, zooming in for detail views, up to 10 image comparisons, and automatic image citations.
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