The VRC’s mission is to create and maintain high-quality collective visual resources for teaching and research, though we recognize that the very nature of image-based scholarship often necessitates that students, instructors, and faculty maintain their own personal image archives. The VRC offers a variety of services to help faculty and graduate students create and maintain their personal archives. In addition to our online Guide to Managing Personal Image Archives and our Personal Archiving Workshops, the VRC offers the following services to our faculty and students in the Humanities.
For digital imaging:
- The VRC can consult on the best methods and equipment for personally scanning images.
- The VRC offers training and guidance on editing images and access to Adobe Creative Cloud apps such as Photoshop and Lightroom for you to work on your own images
- The VRC offers free, custom image editing and preparation for a limited number of key images for teaching or publication that can be ingested into LUNA (with the possibility to embargo images until after publication)
For image metadata:
- The VRC offers training and guidance on cataloging images
- The VRC offers to share exports of VRC-created metadata for images you request through the VRC for you to use in your own personal archive
For creating and maintaining personal archives:
- The VRC can offer consultation on finding and/or customizing a system that will meet your needs
- The VRC can prepare exports of images and data that you’ve requested for inclusion in LUNA for you to add/ingest into your own personal platform
- If you select a system the VRC recommends, the VRC can offer light troubleshooting if you run into technical difficulties
- The VRC can offer training to faculty-funded RAs on image editing, metadata creation, and maintaining personal image archives
If you would like to contribute a set of images and metadata records from your personal image archive to the VRC for inclusion in our LUNA digital collections, we welcome your collaboration in several ways:
If you are an Art History faculty member wishing to share portions of your archive for teaching/research purposes, the VRC can offer to edit and catalog your images for free. Please reach out to visualresources@uchicago.edu to discuss this service, considering the scope, timeline, and project intensity. In some cases, the VRC may be able to pair a student employee for your project.
If you are an Art History PhD student student, the VRC offers a stipended PhD Student Research Photo Collaboration opportunity. Currently this collaboration is available to students preparing for research travel, but the VRC is open to reconfiguring this collaboration in light of the ongoing pandemic. If you are interested, please write to visualresources@uchicago.edu or complete the online form.
Please also refer to VRC services to faculty and graduate students on images for publication and images for dissertation.