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. The digital collection numbers approximately 70,000. 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) by visiting Denison’s CONTENTdm website.
The majority of the slides were acquired through in-house copy photography or commercial vendors. The digital collections continue to be developed in much the same way. Both collections represent images of paintings, sculpture, architecture, textile arts, maps and non-western 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, multimedia 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. 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 as well.
For more information on using the collection please call: 740-587-6480.