Visual Resources Center Activities FY 2006-07

Demands for the use of digital images have grown sharply on our campus. These demands come with advances in digital technologies and our transitioning away from collecting and presenting images on 35mm film.

To this day, we still maintain a large collection of 35mm slides of art for presentations in the classroom. As digital images are becoming more readily available for use the 35mm film is becoming a less needed collection. On our campus, the overall use of the 35mm slide collection has been on a steady decline and we believe the collection will eventually fall into disuse.

Several times throughout the Fall 2006 and Spring 2007 terms our Access Services Coordinator, Stephanie Johnson reported that, "…faculty members who wanted to learn how to create digital slide shows in lieu of using [35mm] slides & projectors,” were approaching her to learn the basics of using digital images on the computer and in the classroom.

At the Krieble Library, we have been taking strides towards making digital image resources available for teaching and learning on our campus for several years. Part of these efforts includes providing basic advisement and instruction on creating, selecting and using images. Each who endeavors to make use of these image resources needs to learn how to use digital cameras, computers, scanners and a number of different software programs. The past two semesters we have experienced a heavy increase in the demand for our related instructional services most pointedly from our teaching faculty.

On an individual appointment basis, several faculty members came into the Visual Resource Center at the Krieble Library for a series of lessons. We are set-up in the Visual Resources Center with digital cameras, scanners, and both PC & Macintosh computers for our faculty and students to utilize. They come in to learn the basics of uploading digital images from their cameras or scanner, saving the images to file, and cropping, rotating and enhancing their images in Photoshop. They also learn to use presentation software MS PowerPoint and about burning their finalized presentations to disc.

As an example, David Dewey signed up for instructional time with our Access Service Coordinator, Stephanie Johnson, in the VR Room for basic Photoshop & Powerpoint lessons. She reports that:

He wanted to use his camera to take digital images. Stephanie demonstrated to David how to create a folder on the PC desktop and save his images to that file from the flash card & instructed him in cropping, rotating and enhancing his photos in Photoshop. In Powerpoint, she showed David how to insert images, resize images to fit the slides, change backgrounds and rearrange the slide order. She demonstrated burning the Powerpoint presentation to CD. They did a test run of the presentation on a laptop hooked up to the LCD projector. Over the next several weeks, they would meet and go over the previous instruction – the presentations became more refined as David became more comfortable with the technology. David experimented on his own with his own PC using the Powerpoint tutorial she created to aid him in his self-learning."

You will find additional annual reviews in the July 2007 blog archive…

Respectfully posted,
By Loree Bourgoin
Director of the Krieble Library