Named after the small red sticker that once guided scholars through legacy 35mm slides, The Red Dot is here to help you navigate the ever-evolving landscape of visual and material research. While rooted in the University of California, Santa Barbara community, our posts are open to all.
At MIRL, we engage with art history, digital humanities, and material culture through hands-on research and archival projects. Guided by our core principles—critical engagement with visual and material culture, ethical stewardship of images and data, and innovative approaches to research and pedagogy—we work at the intersection of technology and the humanities. We are especially interested in how digital tools can expand the study of images, objects, and spaces.
Here, we’ll share insights on Digital Art History and Architectural History, highlight new image and data resources, discuss copyright and ethical considerations, and spotlight events that shape our field.
The Red Dot © 2025 is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0
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New ARTstor collection releases
ARTstor announced the following collections are now available: The Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art (approximately 800 images, learn more) The Roy Lichtenstein Collection (800 images, learn more) MoMA Exhibition Installation Photograph Collection [The Museum of Modern Art Archives] (last release completed and totals roughly 16,700 images, learn more) Larry Qualls Archive of Contemporary Art… Read more
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New ARTstor feature: Associated Image Clusters
There are two new icons in ARTstor that help you efficiently find and use images. When applicable, the icons are located beneath a thumbnail image on the search results screen and help you act on special features related to that image. The two new icons are: Duplicates & Details: This identifies groups of image duplicates… Read more
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Searching with diacritics on VRC-MDID:
While searching on the VRC’s image database is very flexible and user-friendly, there is one flaw which came up again this week. If a word is entered in our catalogue with diacritics or accents (e.g. the umlaut in DÜRER) you will need to include those in your search – in other words, DÜRER will work,… Read more
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Image resources available to all UCSB users
We keep a growing list of resources here – there are links to our collection database (VRC-MDID), ARTstor, plus many other image resources, organized and annotated. Some of these are open to the public, some are licensed for UCSB use. Please visit, and let us know if you find something great to add, or notice… Read more
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Get oriented at The Red Dot
Welcome to the new blog of the Visual Resources Collection at UCSB, The Red Dot. In case you don’t get that reference, it’s the little red dot in the corner of our 35mm slides that help you with orientation. And that’s what we’re here for – orientation, information, hot tips, and more. We’ll be posting… Read more