The Image Resource Center focuses on resources for teaching in the Department 
of Art and Art History. We provide and facilitate visual materials – both real and virtual – to department faculty and graduate teaching assistants in support of their courses. Among our resources are over 4,200 digital images of works of art and architecture, slide and digital projection equipment, and more than 80,000 35mm slides. We have collections of art videos and DVDs, books, and journals. We also have a growing archive of ephemera related to the history of the department since the mid-1940s.
SEARCH FOR IMAGES on our Image Search page.
HOURS and How to Contact Us
The Image Resource Center is located in Garland Hall 205. We are open Monday through Friday, 8:00 am to 12:00 noon and 1:00 pm to 4:45 pm, unless otherwise noted. Please call or email Rachel Dobson, Visual Resources Curator, if you would like to visit or have questions: (205) 348-1893; rdobson@bama.ua.edu.
The Image Resource Center is open to all art faculty, teaching assistants, and 
graduate students. Undergraduates taking an ART or ARH course who have a faculty sponsor are also welcome to use our resources. We welcome inquiries from other UA faculty and grad students who need assistance in searching for images and related research and technical issues. Faculty outside the art department should look to the Classroom Resource Center (http://crc.ua.edu/) for projection equipment and support, and to the Faculty Resource Center (http://frc.ua.edu/) for teaching resources and software support.
Art faculty members are encouraged to participate in the continued growth of the Image Resource Center by making requests and acquisition suggestions of images and other resources. Email your queries and suggestions to rdobson@bama.ua.edu.
COLLECTIONS
We have more than 4,200 digital images stored on the Arts and Sciences shared server that are easily browsable by time period and artist’s name. Along with the traditional canon of Western Art, we have a growing collection of Asian digital images and slides, a collection of archival images pertaining to the department’s history on the The University of Alabama campus, and a complete collection of images and powerpoints related to our art history survey courses. All materials within the collections of the Image Resource Center are protected under copyright laws. For further information about fair use and copyright restrictions, contact the VRCurator.
IRC RESOURCES AND SERVICES
- Check out videos, DVDs, books, journals, and other art-related periodicals. An MS Excel file of dvds and videos is available.
- Get personal help finding images in any of our digital collections, including art historical images, department history archives, and graduate student theses.
- Use ARTstor, a subscription-based digital library of nearly one million images in the areas of art, architecture, the humanities, and social sciences available to the UA community through the UA Libraries website.
- Request scanned images for your course(s) two weeks ahead.
- Get help building a MS Powerpoint lecture, scanning your own images, or manipulating images in Photoshop, and other tasks. If you are interested in learning about these or other skills, please contact me.
- Borrow equipment for your classes: carousels, slide projectors, and the portable digital image projector (ask early – it is often in use).
- Prepare for class in a quiet space surrounded by resources. Get help researching obscure images.
- Reserve Garland digital classrooms (203 and 208) for your makeup exams, special lectures, critiques, meetings, and other events through the Visual Resources Curator. Email the date, time, purpose, number of participants, and any special needs you have.
- Send your recent accomplishments, publications, exhibitions, travels, and other news to rdobson@bama.ua.edu for publication in The Loupe, our departmental newsletter that also goes out to alumni and administrators on campus.
WEB 2.0 & OTHER RESOURCES
To supplement our collection and that of ARTstor, we have developed several online resource sites for art and art history, including Delicious bookmarks, a Flickr page, a two Facebook groups.
- FLICKR – images of people, events, and life around the Department of Art and Art History: http://www.flickr.com/photos/uaart/
- DELICIOUS – websites of interest, organized with tags like imagecollection, arh253, faculty, and tags designating subjects and periods of art, like contemporary, renaissance, photography, bookarts: http://del.icio.us/Resources4UAArt
- FACEBOOK Group for UA Art Students, Faculty, Staff, and Alumni: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=83017029656
HERE TO HELP
If you have questions or need help finding images, contact us for ideas, advice, and help in your search: 348-1893 or rdobson@bama.ua.edu. Rachel Dobson is the visual resources curator for the Department of Art and Art History. She holds a B.A. in studio art from Smith College and an M.L.I.S and an M.A. (art history) from The University of Alabama. Her art history thesis topic focused on fifteenth-century French books of hours, and she has done research in early medieval Irish ecclesiastical architecture and architectural sculpture, and most recently, the history of Pentecostalism in the southeastern United States.
