Christine Hilker

Contact Information

Home / Directory / Christine Hilker

Media Center Director

B.A. History, M.Ed. Instructional Resources, The University of Arkansas

Chris Hilker was honored with the 2008 Distinguished Service Award from the Visual Resources Association in recognition of her 27 years of service in the profession. When Hilker arrived at the School of Architecture in 1979, she found some 65,000 slides, a few reel-to-reel tapes and no catalog of any kind. She bought a video camera and a computer and got busy, building the collection to 80,000 slides, 1,000 videos and 35,000 digital images.When School of Architecture students contemplate a crisp image of the sacred circle at Stonehenge glowing on a screen in a dark auditorium, they benefit from the knowledge and organizational prowess of Christine Hilker.

Chris pulls together a compendium of web and print resources that are of great help in cataloging and finding information about architecture and the built environment. Her work is both visual and largely invisible (only a fraction of the school’s students have found the center, perched high in the former stacks of Vol Walker Hall), but it has not gone unnoticed.

These days, instead of filing slides, student workers spend most of their time scanning them for inclusion in Hilker’s digital database, which she plans to offer campuswide. “We are lucky to have Chris Hilker, who has very capably ushered the school’s visual resources into the digital era,” said Jeff Shannon, dean of the School of Architecture. “Designers learn from the work of other designers, and Chris facilitates this process of learning by seeing."