Finding Images Online
Introduction
This Finding Images Online web page is not a comprehensive list of image resources, but rather a selection of resources which stand out for content and ease of use. You can review the section on Internet Search Engines if you wish to find other image resources.
The purpose of this guide is to point out some of the outstanding image resources available on the Internet. As with text resources, you should also document image sources in any work you produce. It may help to look at the information on our Citing Electronic Documents web page, before you start your research, so that you will have all the required documentation at hand when you need it. Evaluating the resources you find is also an essential part of the research process. See our guide on Evaluating Internet Resources.
Public Domain images are not protected under patent or copyright law. For more information on searching for public domain images, refer to the Images section of our Finding Public Domain Texts, Images and Music web page.
Many image sites have copyrighted material available with limits to usage. This means that you may view, browse through, download or copy one copy of the image on a single computer for your personal, noncommercial home use, provided you retain all credits and copyright notices associated with the image. For more information see the University of Texas system's Multimedia Fair Use Guidelines, a section of their page on Copyright Law in the Electronic Environment. Their Crash Course in Copyright is also useful..
As the internet becomes a vast gallery of images, art specific resources help define and direct search efforts. Many image resources could easily be placed in more than one category. For simplicity, links have been grouped by their primary expected use in finding images. Within each subject area, sites are ordered alphabetically.
The sources listed in this guide were chosen for the broad coverage they provide. You may also want to take a look at the Library Research Guides page for subject oriented search strategies.
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Art and Art History
AICT : Art Images for College Teaching
A
free-use image resource for the educational community. It is maintained and distributed under the general
auspices of the Minneapolis College of Art & Design (MCAD).
http://arthist.cla.umn.edu/aict/
Art History Resources on the Web
A
chronologically-arranged comprehensive list of links to art history resources, provided
by Christopher L. C. E. Witcombe.
http://witcombe.bcpw.sbc.edu/ARTHLinks.html
Art on the Web
More than 1,200
links on art and architecture maintained by Prof. Jeffery Howe of the Boston College Fine Arts department.
http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/fnart/Artweb_frames.html
Artcyclopedia
Scroll down to the useful search field and index list.
This site is a guide to museum-quality fine art on the Internet, with directory of both artist and museums.
It allows to you to search by the artist's name or search through lists of artists arranged alphabetically.
You can also search by movement, medium, subject matter, or nationality.
http://www.artcyclopedia.com/
Image Collections and Online Art
From
the Mother of All Art and Art History Links Pages, now available
courtesy of the School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan.
http://www.art-design.umich.edu/mother/images.html
SILS Art Image Browser
A database of art,
architectural, and
museum object images provided by
the Ann Arbor, MI, University of Michigan Museum of Art.
The SI Art Image Browser is a research project headed by Associate Dean C. Olivia Frost
and Associate Professor Karen Drabenstott,
at the University of Michigan School of Information and Library Studies (SILS).
http://www.si.umich.edu/Art_History/
University of Washington Libraries Digital Collection
Featuring
a growing number of collections from the University of Washington Libraries and faculty in such
diverse areas as the humanities, the natural sciences, and the regional cultures of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska.
http://content.lib.washington.edu/
World Wide Arts Resources : Indepth Arts Search
Art History Index of Artists
database provides imagery and indepth information to over 22,000 artists. Over 200,000 images
from certain museums are directly accessible via this database.
http://wwar.com/search.html
Web Gallery of Art
The Web Gallery of Art
contains over 11,000 digital reproductions of European paintings and sculptures
created between the years 1150 and 1800.
http://www.kfki.hu/~arthp/index1.html
To find other image searching resources see our Internet Resources for Art and Art History webpage.
Ancient and Medieval Art
Diotima
Materials for the
study of women and gender in the ancient world which includes a link
to the Perseus Art and Archaeology Databases with over 30,000 images.
http://www.stoa.org/diotima/art.shtml
Illuminated Manuscript Images from the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford
The Bodleian
Library is the main research library of the University of Oxford. It is also a copyright
deposit library and its collections are used by scholars from around the world.
http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/dept/scwmss/wmss/medieval/browse.htm
Labyrinth: Resources for Medieval Studies
Site made
possible by the ongoing support of the Georgetown University Medieval Studies Program.
http://www.georgetown.edu/labyrinth/
16th Century to Contemporary Art
Art on the Net
A
collective of artists helping each other to come up on the Internet and share their
works on the World Wide Web. Artists create and maintain studios and rooms in the
gallery where they show their works and share about themselves.
Currently their site is international, representing over 100 artists from around the world.
http://www.art.net/
AskArt.com
Database on 28,000
American artists spanning the 16th to the 21st centuries. Created by
Roger Dunbier, Ph.D. in collaboration with Charles Lefebvre.
Currently George Collins oversees this privately held corporation
dedicated to the creation and maintenance of the world’s most comprehensive
centralized database about American artists.
http://www.AskArt.com/
dArt : Internet Art Database
Claims to
be the largest fine art listing service on the Web. It contains art from thousands of collectors, artists and dealers. Includes some reproduction posters of earlier art.
http://dart.fine-art.com/
SITO Artchive
A
free space for artists to display their personal artwork.
SITO was founded by Ed Stastny,
who maintains the site with the techical support of Jon Van Oast and the
donation of server colocation from Novia.
SITO used to be OTIS, but due to a trademark dispute, they changed their
name. Art in the Artchive is for
viewing on SITO only, unless explicitly stated otherwise.
Contact the artist or SITO for permission to use copyrighted work.
http://www.sito.org/artchive/
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Museum Collections
Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO)
The Art Museum Image
Consortium (AMICO) is a not-for-profit organization of institutions with collections of art,
collaborating to enable educational use of museum multimedia.
http://www.amico.org/
Hermitage Museum at St. Petersburg
The
Hermitage Web site was recently voted the best in Russia.
http://www.hermitagemuseum.org/html_En/index.html
Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)Search
The
Metropolitan
Museum's online collection currently includes the entire Department of European Paintings, the Provenance Research
Project, and highlights from each of the Museum's seventeen other curatorial departments.
http://metmuseum.org/collections/search.asp
National Museum of African Art
The
collection of the National Museum of African Art (NMAfA) embraces the diverse artistic
expressions found throughout Africa, from ancient to contemporary times.
Collection objects range from ceramics, textiles, furniture and tools to masks, figures and musical instruments.
http://www.nmafa.si.edu/pubaccess/pages/advanfrm.htm
Norton Simon Museum
Contains
14th through 20th century works as well as new acquisitions.
http://www.nortonsimon.org/collections/
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Home of the largest collection of American art in the world. Its holdings-over 37,500 works-represent
the most inclusive collection of American art of any general museum today,
reflecting the nation's ethnic, geographic, cultural, and religious diversity.
http://americanart.si.edu/collections/main.html
Smithsonian National Museum of American History
Start
with the Smithsonian's Virtual Exhibitions Collections document our national heritage in technology,
industrial development, military history, transportation, textiles, costume, domestic life, sport, the arts, and
community life. Ancient coins, racing cars, inaugural gowns of America's first ladies, musical instruments, weaponry,
farm machinery.
http://americanhistory.si.edu/
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Architecture
Great Buildings Collection
Gateway to
architecture around the world and across history documents a thousand buildings and hundreds
of leading architects, with 3D models, photographic images and architectural drawings, commentaries,
bibliographies, web links, and more, for famous designers and structures of all kinds.
http://www.greatbuildings.com/
SPIRO: Architecture Slide Library
Provides online images from the large collection of slides at the University of California at Berkeley.
http://www.mip.berkeley.edu/query_forms/browse_spiro_form.html
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Science
Ames Imaging Library Server
The Ames Imaging Library Server from NASA contains a sampling of the "60+ Years of Excellence" in Ames research
projects covering its role in the fields of Aeronautics, Astronautics, Information Systems, Life Sciences and Space Technology,
1939 through the present day.
http://ails.arc.nasa.gov/digital1.html
Visual Library
Provided by
the Access Excellence Resource Center. Various biological images including skeletons, genetics,
cells, viruses, microscopy, and animals.
http://www.accessexcellence.org/RC/#visual
WebElements Periodic Table Scholar Edition
Aims to be a high quality source of information on the WWW about the periodic table for students.
You will find many pictures showing element structures and periodic properties.
http://www.webelements.com/webelements/scholar/index.html
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Government Sites
Library of Congress
Provides access to images.
The American Memory Collections provide
a gateway to U. S. History and culture. American Memory is a rich primary source materials relating to
the history and culture of the United States. The site offers more than 7 million digital items from more than
100 historical collections. The Library of Congress Exhibitions provide
access to many online galleries.
http://www.loc.gov/
National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)
Research in Federal Records and Presidential Materials organized by media.
http://www.archives.gov/
National Gallery of Art
Houses one of the
finest collections in the world illustrating major achievements in painting, sculpture,
and graphic arts from the Middle Ages to the present. Search the collection by artist, title, subject,
expanded search, provenance, or accession number for information from the collection database.
Search the National Gallery of Art collection by artist,
title, subject, expanded search, provenance, or accession number for information from the collection database.
http://www.nga.gov/search/
National Portrait Gallery
Digitized images are currently
being incorporated into the database, beginning with images of nationally significant Americans from the
National Portrait Gallery's permanent collection. Search the
portrait collection records of the National Portrait Gallery and the research records of the Catalog of American Portraits.
http://www.npg.si.edu/
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Other Image Collections
Alltheweb
After you select PICTURES, you have many
limits to choose from including jpeg, gif and bmp image file formats, and color, grayscale or line art
image types. You can also search for VIDEO images in AVI , AVI/DivX, MPEG, Real or QuickTime formats.
http://www.alltheweb.com/
Corbis
Made up of
more than 65 million images, 2.1 million online. This is a commercial
site, but you can view medium-sized images for free, and larger images with a digital watermark on them.
http://www.corbis.com
Digital Scriptorium Projects
The Digital Scriptorium includes scanned text and images which are digitized and made available via the
World Wide Web selected items from various collections in the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library,
as well as creating on-line versions of exhibits that were featured in the Perkins Library gallery or Rare Book Room cases.
Digital Scriptorium projects cover everything from ancient papyri to 20th century presidential campaign memorabilia , and much more in between.
http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/scriptorium/projects.html
Includes hundreds of thousands of images. Material can be browsed or searched. Some moving images and sound recordings are available, as are maps, photographs, and prints.
Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection
The
Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection (PCL 1.306) is a general collection of more than 250,000 maps
covering all areas of the world. Many of the maps are included in our online catalog UTNetCAT.
More than 5,000 map images from our collection are also available online.
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/index.html
Picture Australia
PictureAustralia provides access to images that cover all aspects of Australiana:
Artworks include paintings, drawings, prints and posters of abstract art, fine art and portraits;
Photographs capture people, places and even Objects including sculpture, scrimshaw, bark, costume, and weapons.
Images may be in black and white or full color.
http://www.pictureaustralia.org/apps/pictureaustralia
Virginia Tech Imagebase
A collection of thousands of images from the collections at Virgina Tech. The database can be searched or browsed by subject category. Some images are available to researchers on the Virginia Tech campus only.
Webshots
A collection of over 20 million photos.
http://www.webshots.com/explore/
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Internet Search Engines
Popular image search engines include:
Of course, there are many more web resources available that might be useful in your research. You might want to try looking at sources that select the best of the Web, such as these:
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Definitions of terms and abbreviations:
Ref. = Reference collection, first floor
RRef.= Ready reference, shelves behind the reference desk
Periodicals = Current issues; Level A
Periodical Back Files = Level A
GovDoc = U.S. Government Documents, second floor
Reference Indexes = Alphabetically arranged at the end of the reference collection
Microform Area = Reading room east of the reference desk, near microform drawers
q. = Oversized books: interfiled in reference and M class scores; at end of classes in other collections
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