History of Visual Resources Collections
The first American lantern slide collections, developed by museums to reflect and augment their collections, got their start between 1860 and 1879: the American Natural History Museum, the New York State Military Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Winterthur Museum. American colleges and universities began their collections during the same period of time: DePauw University, Columbia University, Oberlin College, Princeton University, University of Rochester. Colleges and university collections were used primarily for classroom instruction.
The first illustrated architectural history course west of the Mississippi was John Galen Howard's Architecture 5A-F at the University of California, Berkeley in 1905. The six-semester course was required for all architecture students, and like other architectural history courses of its time, at MIT and Cornell at least, were multi-year in duration. Of course, the lecture was illustrated by lantern slides. In the U.S., lantern slides generally measured 3"x 4.25".
The 1950s was a period of transition from black and white lantern slides, which heretofore had often been hand colored, to color positive film. Lantern slides were shot directly onto color film, and the 35mm slide (2"x2" with an image of 24mm x 36mm) gained in popularity.
The heyday of the lantern slide lasted one hundred years, more or less, from 1860 to 1960. The reign of the 35mm slide, more or less, was about half as long, fifty years, 1955–2005.
Read more about this topic: Slide Library
Famous quotes containing the words history of, history, visual, resources and/or collections:
“Look through the whole history of countries professing the Romish religion, and you will uniformly find the leaven of this besetting and accursed principle of action—that the end will sanction any means.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
“The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“To write well, to have style ... is to paint. The master faculty of style is therefore the visual memory. If a writer does not see what he describes—countrysides and figures, movements and gestures—how could he have a style, that is originality?”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)
“We live in a time which has created the art of the absurd. It is our art. It contains happenings, Pop art, camp, a theater of the absurd.... Do we have the art because the absurd is the patina of waste...? Or are we face to face with a desperate or most rational effort from the deepest resources of the unconscious of us all to rescue civilization from the pit and plague of its bedding?”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“Most of those who make collections of verse or epigram are like men eating cherries or oysters: they choose out the best at first, and end by eating all.”
—Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort (1741–1794)