The Visual Resources Centre provides a range of image-related support services to students and academic staff at the Manchester School of Art (part of Manchester Metropolitan University). It has been facilitating the use of visual images for learning, teaching and research in art and design for nearly 50 years, and during that period it has developed extensive collections comprising around 300,000 images.

Our Flickr photostream represents only a tiny proportion of these, and is organised into themed sets. Some of these sets relate to specific course units, but most are intended to provide just a glimpse of the Centre's image collections.

The Centre's main slide collection was begun by the Manchester College of Art and Design in the mid 1960s. It , overs a broad spectrum of art and design subjects and is one of the largest collections of its type in the UK. It includes many unique and original photographs of architecture and planning developments in Manchester and North West England, such as the Hulme housing scheme of the late 1960s and early 70s.

The Centre also houses the Design Council Slide Collection, an internationally significant record of mainly British design from the early 1950s to the 1990s.

A particular strength of the Centre's collections is the 20,000+ photographs that record the work of past art and design students since the 1960s. Most of these images were taken at the annual degree or diploma shows at the Manchester School of Art and its predecessor institutions (the Faculty of Art and Design at Manchester Metropolitan University and Manchester Polytechnic, the Manchester College of Art and Design and the Regional College of Art, Manchester). However, many of the students whose work is shown in these images are unidentified, and we would welcome information from alumni or former members of staff to help us put names to the images. So if you recognise any of the student work shown, please let us know by posting a comment or contacting us by Flicrk mail.

In addition to using Flickr to make the Visual Resources Centre' s collections more widely accessible, we are also developing a Historypin channel at:

www.historypin.com/channels/view/id/9230020/

(best viewed in Firefox or Chrome).

mmuvisualresources.blogspot.co.uk/