Students in “Fine Arts 225: Sublime, Picturesque and Romantic” spent the fall semester studying rare books, many of which are centuries old. Ordinarily, these costly and fragile documents never leave the protective environment of the College’s Watkinson Library. But with the aid of new technology—and with an assist from an innovative grant—students in the course were able to access key parts of these books any time, day or night, simply by calling them up on their computers.

Trinity, along with Connecticut College and Wesleyan University, has received a $660,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support collaborative programs in information literacy. This course—taught by Alden Gordon, the Gwendolyn Miles Smith Professor of Art History—is one of the early fruits of that collaboration. According to Gordon, “This is a traditional art history class, one I have taught before, but this time we were able to enhance the course through the use of computer technology. One of the goals of this course is to introduce students to original materials that are available right here on campus, and we are very fortunate to have the extensive holdings of the Watkinson Library to draw on.” The class covers the period from the Enlightenment through the French Revolution and early Romanticism, concentrating on the period from the 1740s to the 1830s.

Mellon funding was used to purchase a digital camera for the Watkinson Library, which meant that selected pages from such volumes as John Hawkesworth’s 1773 book on the voyages of Captain Cook and others, Samuel Turner’s An account of an embassy to the court of the Teshoo Lama in Tibet, and Charles Owens’s An essay toward a
natural history of serpents, published in 1742, could be copied and placed on Trinity’s Blackboard Web site, a secure area of the Web where information for various classes can be accessed by students and faculty members.

The result was that students in Fine Arts 225 not only saw the original documents during the Watkinson’s regular hours, but also had immediate access to images from these volumes during evening or weekend study time. The students could also download the digitized images and place them directly into term papers to illustrate key points.

According to Christina McBroom ’07 (above), a member of the class, “Other art history classes I have taken emphasized painting and sculpture, not book illustration. It has been great to have access to the Watkinson collection, and having the books on the Web means that we can see them whenever we are working on our term papers, even if it’s outside of library hours.”

A second important addition of computer support for this course was the purchase of RefWorks, a bibliographic software program that allows students to search for references pertaining to their research projects in many other libraries and databases. In addition to expanding the base of research materials, RefWorks also makes term paper writing more efficient, as it automates the interaction between footnotes and material listed in the paper’s bibliography. According to Gordon, “RefWorks is an invaluable tool, not only for this class, but also for other classes that these students will take as well.”

The books used in the course will be displayed in the Watkinson Library during the spring semester, and the term papers from the first semester will be used as the basis for informational labels to accompany the exhibition. Finally, all the digital images used in the course will be stored in the College’s art history slide library for use by future classes.

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