New Additions to VADS Collections

Posted by John Hargreaves on Friday 06 May 2011 at 12:10pm
Tags: digital collections | licensing | photographs | photography |

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Image credit: RCA and individual artists

'Two of the Royal College of Art’s most important collections have been made available to the general public through a new digitisation project which is accessible through the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS).

'The Record of Student Work is a rare collection, containing over 30,000 slides of student work, which dates back to the 1960s and includes early work by notable College alumni including David Hockney, Tracey Emin, Ridley Scott and Thomas Heatherwick. A comprehensive and unique resource, it provides insight into the early creative processes of some of Britain’s best-known artists and designers, usually captured as they complete their postgraduate studies with installation shots from students’ degree shows.

'In addition to the Record of Student Work, over a thousand works from the Royal College of Art Collection of Paintings have been digitised and are also being made available through VADS. The Royal College of Art Collection is an invaluable resource of works that represent significant developments in British painting from the middle years of the 20th century to the present. The collection is made up of works donated by Painting graduates and staff. Examples include works by: Edward Bawden, Eric Ravilious, Paul Nash, John Piper, Frank Auerbach, John Minton, Peter Blake, David Hockney, Chris Ofili, Tracey Emin, Dinos Chapman and Sophie von Hellermann.

'The Visual Arts Data Service (VADS) is a Research Centre within the Library and Learning Services Department at the University for the Creative Arts, and specialises in the management, storage, presentation, and archiving of digital images and other arts-based assets. VADS was founded to provide services to the academic community 14 years ago, and since that time it has built an online collection of more than 120,000 images of rare and unique collections from libraries, museums, and archives in universities and colleges across the UK, which are made available online for the purposes of learning, teaching, and research at: www.vads.ac.uk'

View the collections online at:

Royal College of Art Record of Student Work

Royal College of Art Collection'

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