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VISUAL RESOURCES COLLECTION

Guidelines for Proseminar/Seminar Students

Students enrolled in Art History proseminars and seminars may use the Visual Resources Collection (Slide Room) to prepare illustrated seminar presentations. Ordinarily the collection is open only to Art History Department faculty members and teaching assistants. The collection is located in Room 213, Elvehjem Building. The office of the curator, Jacob Esselstrom, is in Room 214.

  1. Business Hours. The collection is open to seminar students Monday through Friday, 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. There are no evening or weekend hours. An appointment to examine materials relevant to your project may be made with the curator by phone (263-2288) or email, but email is preferred. Provide a suggested date and time, which will be confirmed, and include a brief description of your project. Specific questions may be handled by email as well. You can also frequently use the collection on a walk-in basis during the assigned hours, though you may find the room closed for short periods during regular hours if no one is available for supervision.

  2. Access to the Collection. Check in with the curator or another member of the slide room staff. After you have been verified as an authorized student user, you will be directed to the area in the collection that applies to your presentation. Slide room staff will be happy to help you find your way around the collection.

  3. Examining the Collection. The collection supports the curriculum, so its holdings are strongest in the areas taught by the department. Since it is possible the collection may not have what you need, it is a good idea to familiarize yourself with the holdings in your area as soon as your topic is assigned. The collection is designed as a teaching collection, so it is not easily browsed. You should first have done some library research and begun to identify objects that you might want to illustrate in your report. Bring a list of these objects with you and include as much detail as possible so that staff can better help you. An authority list is available that lists all artists represented in the collection and where their works can be found in the collection. You may also consult InSitu, the collection’s online database, which provides more “browsing” functionality than the physical collection. When you search using InSitu be sure to have the search funstion set to "Show all records" so that your search results may include records for slides that have yet to be scanned. If the Visual Resources Collection does not have the material you need, several strategies are available for filling the gaps.

  4. Filling Gaps. Several options are open to you if the collection lacks the material you need to illustrate your report:

    • If you prefer to do a slide presentation, you can make the slides yourself using the copy stands available in the Kohler Art Library (inquire at the Circulation Desk) or at the Center for Instructional Materials and Computing.

    • You can scan reproductions from your sources and produce a PowerPoint presentation. We strongly recommend that you use digital images with PowerPoint or equivalent presentation software. Equipment for producing high quality scans is readily available on campus. A large-format flatbed scanner is available for patron use in the Art Library. Many campus InfoLabs are equipped with flatbed and slide scanners. College Library (in Helen C. White Hall) has an extensive computing center and also makes short-term loans of specialized hardware such as digital cameras (both still and video) and laptops.

    • You may find digital images in InSitu (see item 3 above) that you can use for your report. You may also find images on the internet at large (see the Art Library’s guide to finding images).
     

    If there are Visual Resource Collection slides that you would like to include in a PowerPoint presentation, collection staff will scan up to fifteen items for you with two-weeks’ advance notice. We do not recommend trying to combine slides and digital images for your presentation.

  5. Practicing Your Report (Slide presentations only). If you would like to practice a slide presentation ahead of time, contact collection staff to schedule a room.

  6. PowerPoint. We do not provide practice rooms for PowerPoint presentations, since they can be practiced on just about any computer. The software itself is simple to use. If you would like guidance, DoIT offers training sessions on PowerPoint at no charge to students. The CIMC, UW School of Education, provides links to online tutorials for PowerPoint, Photoshop, and other common applications. If you intend to use the department’s laptop for your presentation, it is a good idea to bring in your file ahead of time to ensure that it displays correctly. If your PowerPoint slides include text, note that some fonts may not display consistently if you are displaying your PowerPoint file on a computer different from the one you used to create it. You can avoid font problems by “embedding” fonts when you save the file (choose “Save As” from the File menu, then click “Tools” at the top right of the dialog that appears, then click "Save Options"and then select “Embed TrueType Fonts”).

  7. Reserve Procedure (Slide presentations). Collection slides do not circulate like library books; they remain in the Slide Room until the time of your presentation. However, slides may be placed on reserve up to one week in advance of your report so you can assure that everything you need will be available on your report date. On the day of your report plan to arrive at least an hour before class time to load your slides into carousels. Slide room staff will assist you. Hand in your Reserve Form to a slide room attendant before the slides are removed from the room. Since the collection is closed at the hour seminars end, please ask you instructor to return the carousels and slides to the slide room.

  8. Equipment. Standard Kodak carousel projectors are provided in the seminar room. You are expected to run your own projectors for your presentation using remote controls. If you are unfamiliar with any aspect of the equipment, slide room staff will instruct you on proper use prior to your class report. An overhead projector, microfiche projector, lantern slide projector, and VHS/DVD player also available. Should you have a special need for this kind of equipment, please make arrangements with collection staff well in advance of your report date.

If you are using PowerPoint, the seminar room is equipped with a digital projector. We strongly recommend that you use a Visual Resources Collection laptop for your classroom presentation. Bring in your file ahead of time to Room 213 to confirm that it loads and displays correctly. The file can be transferred by common portable media such as a USB flash drive or CD-R (preferred over CD-RW). Loading all the day’s presentations in advance on one laptop makes for smoother transitions during class and avoids delays from swapping equipment as well as reducing the chance of technical difficulties.

If you bring your own laptop because of some special circumstances, it must have a standard VGA connection. Wireless internet access is also available in the Elvehjem Building.