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) 
<http://www.vads.ac.uk>.

The Record of Student Work <http://www.vads.ac.uk/collections/RCAROSW> 
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.

The nature of the collection - comprised mainly of 35mm slides and 
usually locked in filing cabinets in the RCA library - has meant that 
many of these images have never been published. Now however, a 
three-year scanning project has resulted in over 5,000 of the most 
notable images from the collection being made publicly available for the 
first time.

The earliest slides (1960-1978) represent ad hoc attempts by individual 
departments to record their students' work. Fashion and Textiles are 
especially well represented with images of the work of Ossie Clark and 
Zandra Rhodes among many others. However, from 1979, at the instigation 
of Christopher Frayling, then Professor of General Studies, Jan Murton, 
slide curator, and photographer Barry Marsden, the Royal College of Art 
degree show was comprehensively photographed and catalogued across all 
departments for the first time. The approach continues to this day, 
although slides were replaced with digital photography in 2003.

Notable alumni whose work is represented in this selection include: 
David Hockney, Zandra Rhodes, Chris Ofili, Tracey Emin, Julien 
Macdonald, Philip Treacy, Orla Kiely, Harold Offeh and Thomas 
Heatherwick. These images are a representative sample of the entire 
collection 1960-2002 and all have been scanned from the original 35mm 
slides. Senior tutors from each department worked with the Special 
Collections Manager to identify key students' work. Once a student was 
selected, every available slide of their work was digitised to provide a 
comprehensive picture of their work.

In addition to the Record of Student Work, over a thousand works from 
the Royal College of Art Collection of Paintings 
<http://www.vads.ac.uk/collections/RCACC> 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.

Dr Paul Thompson, Rector of the Royal College of Art said: "These are 
indeed remarkable resources. Those selected from the Record of Student 
Work have been chosen not only for their subsequent eminence and 
reputation, but also for embodying particular trends, or producing 
especially idiosyncratic or revealing work. In both collections, the 
works have considerable research value and represent over half a century 
of work here at the RCA"

Neil Parkinson, Special Collections Manager added: "The College believes 
in making the images available as widely as possible on a non-commercial 
basis for the purposes of learning, teaching and research. The Visual 
Arts Data Service (VADS), which collates images from the HE sector for 
educational use, shares this aim, which makes them a natural partner for 
delivery of our image collections to the widest possible audience."

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 <http://www.vads.ac.uk>

View the collections online at:

Royal College of Art Record of Student Work 
<http://www.vads.ac.uk/collections/RCAROSW>

Royal College of Art Collection <http://www.vads.ac.uk/collections/RCACC>