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, now the Visual Resource Center includes a collection of approximately 150,000 35-mm slides. The digital collection numbers approximately 100,000. New slides are no longer being added to the collection, but the existing slides are digitized, cataloged and have been added to the department’s digital holdings. The VRC also houses a collection of glass, magic-lantern slides, which have also been digitized.
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 collections are 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.
Slide circulation ceased in 2007 as the digital holdings grew in size and scope. The art history faculty are the primary users of the collection, though there has been an increase in studio faculty use.