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Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences — Arts & Humanities
Digital Images

Librarian Subject Specialist

Daniel Goldstein
dgoldstein@ucdavis.edu — (530) 752‑2040 — Humanities, Social Sciences, and Government Information Services (http://www.lib.ucdavis.edu/dept/hss/)

On This Page

  • [Restricted] Restricted to UC Davis Campus and authenticated VPN/Proxy users
  • [Restricted] Library Use or On-Campus Use Only
  • Click on VPN to access resource via Library VPN (requires Kerberos login)

Art and Art History

ARTstor (http://uclibs.org/PID/44518) [Restricted] VPN
ARTStor is a library of digital images, associated information, and software tools designed to enhance teaching, learning and scholarship. It contains a searchable database of more than 500,000 digital images, covers many time periods and cultures, and documents the fields of architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, and design, as well as many other forms of visual culture.
Related:
  • ARTstor
    For off-campus access, first register with ARTstor from a computer on campus. Then, you may login from off campus with your ARTstor ID by going directly to www.artstor.org. Or, you may use the VPN or the Proxy Server.
  • If you would like to join a UCD community of ARTstor users to share discoveries and help solve problems, please join our ARTstor Users Group on Smartsite.
Metropolitan Museum of Art Collections Database (http://www.metmuseum.org/works_of_art/collection_database/)

This free database contains images of over 300,000 works of art from the Met's collections. The database is searchable and it is also divided into 22 subject groups including, for example:

  • American Decorative Art
  • Asian Art
  • Islamic Art
  • Musical Instruments
UC: Saskia Art & Architecture [via ARTstor] (http://www.artstor.org) [Restricted] VPN
Saskia offers over 26,000 art historical digital images, with a special emphasis on core images required for teaching the history of Western Art. It is listed on the ARTstor Home page under Institutional Collections, and can be search separately or in conjunction with ARTstor.
Location: For more information see the main ARTstor entry in the databases list.
CAMIO [via OCLC] (http://camio.oclc.org/) [Restricted] VPN
CAMIO--Catalog of Art Museum Images Online--contains around 80,000 images of works of Art from 24 different museums. The artwork selection draws from a wide range of places and time periods.
Related:
  • The images in CAMIO are licensed for non-commericial, educational use (teaching and research).
WorldImages [San Jose State University] (http://worldimages.sjsu.edu/)
WorldImages "contains almost 50,000 images, is global in coverage and includes all areas of visual imagery. WorldImages is accessible anywhere and its images can be freely used for non-profit educational purposes. The images can be located using many search techniques, and for convenience they are organized into some 440 portfolios."
Corsair: Images from Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts (http://corsair.morganlibrary.org/ICAIntro/ICAintroshortdesc.htm)
Corsair, the website for the Pierpont Morgan Library includes a searchable database of more than 15,000 images selected from the Pierpont Morgan Library's collection of medieval manuscripts.
Discover Islamic Art (http://www.discoverislamicart.org)
An online exhibit of Islamic art objects drawn from Museums around the world. It is a project of the Museum With No Frontiers.
Claros: The World of Art on the Semantic Web (http://explore.clarosnet.org)

CLAROS is an international interdisciplinary research federation led by Oxford University. It provides searchable access to online image collections of art and artifacts of the Ancient World at several British and European institutions. includes images from Asia and South Asia as well classical Europe. Thematic Collections include, among others :

  • Eastern Bronzes
  • Western Ceramics
  • Antiquarian Photographs
Grove Dictionary of Art [via Oxford University Press] (http://www.groveart.com/index.html) [Restricted] VPN
The Grove Dictionary of Art is the standard multi-volume reference work on all aspects of the visual arts from prehistory to the present. Now,it has been combined with three other reference works in the new Oxford Art Online. It can be searched separately or in conjunction with The Oxford Companion to Western Art, The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, and the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms. It also incorporates a related collection of more than 5,000 digital images.
National Palace Museum in Taipei [via LunaInsight] (http://uclibs.org/PID/111721)
The curators of the National Palace Museum in Taipei have carefully selected thousands of works from their permanent collection to be included in a new digitized collection. The scope of these works spans seven millennia of Chinese history and pre-history. Works include rare books, ceramics, paintings, bronzes, jewelry, studio accessories, costumes, and more. English-language interface.
Gu gong xian shang 故宮線上典藏資料庫=National Palace Museum Online=NPM Online (Chinese database) (http://www.airitinpm.com/) [Restricted] VPN
The NPM Online is the only online database authorized by the National Palace Museum in Taiwan to display photo images and related descriptive articles about the pieces in their collections. Currently there are more than 12,000 images of Chinese art and antiques. The collections are classified into seven categories: painting, calligraphy, ceramics, jade, bronze, Buddhist antiques, and rarities. THE NPM ONLINE DATABASE IS NO LONGER PRODUCED AND AVAILABLE FOR SUBSCRIPTION.
Coverage: Coverage ranges from 4000 BC to the modern era.
Related:
  • Needs Chinese (traditional) word processor for searching.
  • User Guide (http://www.cdlib.org/inside/instruct/NPMOnlineUserGuide200804.doc)DOC
Your Paintings [via BBC and PCF] (http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/paintings/search)

Searchable image collection composed of the painting held in public collections throughout the UK. 145,000 of a projected 200,000 oil paintings are now in the database, seachable by artist as well as by topic.

This is a joint project of the Public Catalogue Foundation and the BBC.

"Paintings owned by the state and local authorities together with those held in charitable trusts for the benefit of the public make up the national collection shown on the Your Paintings website. In addition, a small number of important collections that are not in public ownership nor normally open to the public are also being included. For example this will include paintings in Bishop’s palaces and Oxford and Cambridge colleges.

Local authority and national museum collections make up the majority of the institutions represented. Paintings held by universities, hospitals, town halls, local libraries and even a lighthouse are also on the site. The site also includes collections held by national organisations such the National Trust, English Heritage, the Government Art Collection and Arts Council England"

Google Art Project (http://www.googleartproject.com/)
This is a collection of high-resolution images from several Art Museums in Europe and the United States.
accessCeramics: a contemporary ceramics image resource (http://accessceramics.org/)
This is a juried site of work by contemporary ceramic artists. It includes images of selected works that can be used for educational purposes. Most of the artists represented are from North America.
Ad*Access Project (http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu:80/adaccess/)
A database of 7,000 images and advertisements printed in U.S. and Canadian newspapers and magazines between 1911 and 1955. Ad*Access concentrates on five main subject areas: Radio, Television, Transportation, Beauty and Hygiene, and World War II.
Coverage: 1911 to 1955

Architecture and Landscape Architecture

Landscape Architecture Image Resource [LAIR] (http://www.lair.umd.edu)
This collection of Landscape Architecture-related images is a joint product of several Landscape Architecture departments, including UCDavis'. Images are well indexed and searchable by a variety of criteria.
Archivision Library [via ARTstor] (http://library.artstor.org) [Restricted] VPN
The Archivision Library, Base Collection and Modules one and two are listed under "Institutional Collections" on ARTstor's home page. It covers core architectural sites from ancient to modern.
Archnet Digital Library (https://archnet.org/library/)
Archnet is a primarily adigital image collection for architecture and landscape architecture. Its geographic focus is the Middle East and Central Asia, but also includes images from other parts of the world. It is a project of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture.
Hartill Archive of Architecture and Allied Arts [via ARTstor] (http://library.artstor.org) [Restricted] VPN
This collection contains over 15,000 images of architecture and architectural decoration from the Ancient to the Modern Western World. Included in the ARTstor library, it can be searched separately by selecting it from the Browse Collections link on ARTstor's home page.
Machiel Kiel Photographic Archive (of Ottoman architectural monuments) [via NIT] (http://www.nit-istanbul.org/kielarchive/)
This growing collection consists of images of Ottoman architectural monuments in the Balkan countries taken by Dutch scholar Machiel Kiel mostly from the 1960s through the 1990s. It is a project of the Netherlands Institute in Turkey (NIT). Currently it contains images from Southeastern Europe.
Mapping Gothic France (http://www.mappinggothicfrance.org)

This innovative site seeks to “provide the user. . .with new ways to understand the relationship of hundreds of buildings conditionally described as ‘Gothic’. . .within a defined period of time and space that corresponds to the advent of the nation of France.” It “seeks to establish linkages between the architectural space of individual buildings, geo-political space, and the social space resulting from the interaction (collaboration and conflict) between multiple agents—builders and users.”

“The Mapping Gothic France project was initiated by Stephen Murray, Professor of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University and Andrew Tallon, Assistant Professor of Art at Vassar College and funded through the generosity of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Mapping Gothic France was developed within the framework of collaboration between the Media Center for Art History in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, the Visual Resources Library at Vassar College, and the Columbia University Libraries.”

Moving Images

American Museum of the Moving Image Online Exhibitions (http://www.movingimage.us/site/online/index.html)
These online exhibitions feature The Pinewood Dialogues Online (conversations with major contemporary figures in film), as well as "The Living Room Candidate: Presidential Campaign Commercials 1952-2004" (includes full videos and transcripts).
Internet Moving Image Archive (http://www.archive.org/details/movies)
This library contains thousands of digital movies uploaded by Archive users which range from classic full-length films, to daily alternative news broadcasts, to cartoons and concerts. Many of these videos are available for free download.
March of Time (http://moto.alexanderstreet.com/) [Restricted] VPN
From 1935-1967, Time Inc. offered Americans views of significant historical events in their newsreel series The March of Time. Several hundred of these newsreels can be searched and viewed as streaming videos. Transcripts of these commercial, documentary, instructional and public service videos accompany the films. In support of research and teaching, the resource enables users to create, edit, and share playlists or film clips.
Coverage: 1903 - 1967
Motion Pictures in the American Memory Project [Library of Congress] (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/browse/ListSome.php?format=Motion+Picture)
Here are the online collections in the Library of Congress' American Memory Project that contain motion pictures. Topics include the history of film itself, advertising, newsreels, and more. They span the Twentieth Century ending with material related to the September 11, 2001 attack.
Moving Image Collections (MIC) (http://mic.loc.gov/)
MIC serves as both a moving image archives directory and a searchable Union Catalog for moving image collections. It also has different web portal features, including preservation information for the general public and resources for science educators.
Open Video Project (http://open-video.org/)
The purpose of the Open Video Project is to collect and make available a repository of digitized video content for the digital video, multimedia retrieval, digital library, and other research communities. Researchers can use the video to study a wide range of problems, such as tests of algorithms for automatic segmentation, summarization, and creation of surrogates that describe video content; the development of face recognition algorithms; or creating and evaluating interfaces that display result sets from multimedia queries. Because researchers attempting to solve similar problems will have access to the same video content, the repository is also intended to be used as a test collection that will enable systems to be compared, similar to the way the TREC conferences are used for text retrieval.
Public Moving Image Archives and Research Centers (http://www.loc.gov/film/arch.html)
This page provides a list of quick links to international archives with moving image collections.

History

AP Images (http://apimages.ap.org/unsecured/logip.aspx) [Restricted] VPN
Formerly known as the AccuNet/Associated Press Photo Archive, this site is an ever-changing collection of over 700,000 photographs from the AP news service, historic images. Most of the images are contemporary and date from 1995 forwards and all include descriptive captions and source information.
Coverage: 1844-present; current file contains 1995-present
New York City Municipal Archive Online Gallery [New York Department of Records] (http://nycma.lunaimaging.com/luna/servlet/)
This extraordinarily rich image database of over 870,000 photographs, maps, motion picture and audio recordings is divided into 30 distinct collections. Collections are organized in numerous ways; most of them are either by the administrations of city mayors and borough presidents, or by municipal department, or by material or subject type.
Coverage: 19th and 20th centuries.
National Archives Digital Copies Search (http://arcweb.archives.gov/arc/action/AdvancedMultimediaSearchForm)
The U.S. National Archives have scanned a significant portion of their holdings, including still and moving images on a wide assortment of topics. This page permits searching of those digitized items only. For a broader search of the holdings of the National Archives, start at their home page, www.nara.gov.
Forest History Society Photograph Collections (http://www.foresthistory.org/Research/FHSPhotoGalleries.html)
Photographs from the first half of the Twentieth Century on a surprisingly wide range of subjects including the San Francisco Earthquake, the Boy Scouts and Farming.
American West: Sources from the Everett D. Graff Collection at the Newberry Library, Chicago [via Adam Matthew] (http://www.americanwest.amdigital.co.uk/Index.aspx) [Restricted] VPN
The Everett D. Graff Collection is one of the major special collections on the American West. This database contains a full-text selection of original manuscripts, maps, ephemeral material and rare printed sources from that collection. It also includes such supplementary materials as scholarly essays and data maps. It is a rich resource to explore almost any aspect of the history of the American West.
The Chinese in California, 1850-1925 (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award99/cubhtml/cichome.html)
The Chinese in California, 1850-1925 illustrates nineteenth and early twentieth century Chinese immigration to California through about 8,000 images and pages of primary source materials. Included are photographs, original art, cartoons and other illustrations; letters, excerpts from diaries, business records, and legal documents; as well as pamphlets, broadsides, speeches, sheet music, and other printed matter. These documents describe the experiences of Chinese immigrants in California, including the nature of inter-ethnic tensions.
Coverage: 1850-1925
Related:
  • The materials in this online compilation are drawn from collections at The Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley; The Ethnic Studies Library, UC Berkeley; and The California Historical Society in San Francisco.
Los Angeles Public Library Photo Collection (http://photos.lapl.org/carlweb/jsp/photosearch_pageADV.jsp)
The Los Angeles Public Library's History and Genealogy Department's Photo Collection emphasizes the history of Los Angeles, Southern California, and California
Upper Mississippi Valley Digital Image Archive (http://www.umvphotoarchive.org/)
This is an online collection of 19th and early 20th century photographs of the Mississippi Valley along the Iowa/Illinois border. They are selected from the collections of several libraries, museums and colleges in the area.
1789-1939 L'Histoire par L'Image (http://www.histoire-image.org/index.php)
This growing collection of historical images from France is a collaborative project of several academic and cultural institutions and the French government. The images are carefully selected and fully described.
Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record (http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/Slavery/)
This image archive features numerous maps, images, and photographs depicting the slave trade and black culture in the Americas. Most are drawn from sources between the 17th and 19th centuries.
Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database [via Emory University] (http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces)
This database provides "information on almost 35,000 slaving voyages that forcibly embarked over 10 million Africans for transport to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries." It is primarily a data set permitting not only the display of details of each individual voyage but also the manipulation of that data in tables and charts. It also contains Maps and primary source images.
Tebtunis Papyri Collection (http://tebtunis.berkeley.edu/index.html)
The Tebtunis Papyri Collection consists of the papyrus documents that were found in the winter of 1899/1900 at the site of ancient Tebtunis, Egypt.
History of Science in Latin America and the Caribbean [via Univ. of New Hampshire] (http://www.hoslac.org/)
HOSLAC is a free database of 200+ primary sources (mostly images) on the history of science in Latin America and the Caribbean. Each image is accompanied by a brief essay that places it in its historical context. Thematic groups of images are also introduced by essays. HOSLAC was produced at the University of New Hampshire with funding from the NSF.
Coverage: Pre-Columbian to the present

Maps

American Memory Map Collections (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gmdhtml/gmdhome.html)
Online images of maps in the Library of Congress's collection. The emphasis is on Americana and Cartographic treasures. Categories of maps include: Discovery and Exploration, Transportation and Communication, Military Battles and Campaigns, Cultural Landscapes, and Conservation and Environment. Many of the maps represented are historical maps and most are not covered by copyright protection.
Coverage: 1500 - present
California Historic Topographic Map Collection (http://cricket.csuchico.edu/spcfotos/maps/topo_search.html)
Special Collections at California State University, Chico's Merriam Library has a fine collection of scanned historic topographic maps of California.
David Rumsey Map Collection (http://www.davidrumsey.com./)
The David Rumsey Historical Map Collection has over 11,000 maps online. The collection focuses on rare 18th and 19th century North and South America maps and other cartographic materials. Historic maps of the World, Europe, Asia and Africa are also represented. Collection categories include antique atlas, globe, school geography, maritime chart, state, county, city, pocket, wall, childrens and manuscript maps.
Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilizations (beta) [via Harvard University] (http://medievalmap.harvard.edu/)
The Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilization (DARMC) makes freely available on the internet the best available materials for a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) approach to mapping and spatial analysis of the Roman and medieval worlds. DARMC allows innovative spatial and temporal analyses of all aspects of the civilizations of western Eurasia in the first 1500 years of our era, as well as the generation of original maps illustrating differing aspects of ancient and medieval civilization. A work in progress with no claim to definitiveness. . .[from the Web site]
MSR Maps [via Microsoft] (http://msrmaps.com/)
MSR (Microsoft Research) Maps (formerly TerraServer USA) offers high resolution maps and aerial photographs of the United States.
Perry-Castaneda Library Map Collection (http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/)
Over 5,500 online map images from the University of Texas's Perry-Castaneda Library Map Collection. Many of the images are general country maps, but there are also many historical maps available with an emphasis on Texas.
UC Berkeley Library Digital Map Collection (http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/EART/browse.html)
Search thousands of digital maps in the University of California, Berkeley's Earth Sciences & Map Library Digital Collection.
Related:

Advertising and Popular Culture

LIFE photo archive hosted by Google (http://images.google.com/hosted/life)
This is a collection of millions of digitized photographs drawn from the LIFE Magazine archives. Many have never been published. A joint project of Life Magazine and Google, it is searchable through the standard Google interface.
Plan59.com (http://www.plan59.com/main.htm)
A "museum (and gift shop) of mid-century illustration," this site has a large collection of 1950s commercial art.

Fashion, Costume and Textiles

Fashion Costume and Textiles Image Collections [via UC Davis] (http://www.lib.ucdavis.edu/dept/hss/resources/guides/fashiontextiles.php#image)
Here is a list of fashion and costume related online collections. It is part of the larger Fashion, Costume and Textiles Subject Guide [via UC Davis] which you may also find useful.
ARTstor (http://uclibs.org/PID/44518) [Restricted] VPN
ARTStor is a library of digital images, associated information, and software tools designed to enhance teaching, learning and scholarship. It contains a searchable database of more than 500,000 digital images, covers many time periods and cultures, and documents the fields of architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, and design, as well as many other forms of visual culture.
Related:
  • ARTstor
    For off-campus access, first register with ARTstor from a computer on campus. Then, you may login from off campus with your ARTstor ID by going directly to www.artstor.org. Or, you may use the VPN or the Proxy Server.
  • If you would like to join a UCD community of ARTstor users to share discoveries and help solve problems, please join our ARTstor Users Group on Smartsite.
Vogue Archive (http://search.proquest.com/vogue/advanced?accountid=14505) [Restricted] VPN
The Vogue Archive contains the entire run of Vogue magazine (US edition), from the first issue in 1892 to the current month, reproduced in high-resolution color page images. Every page, advertisement, cover and fold-out has been included, with rich indexing enabling you to find images by garment type, designer and brand names. Search by advertisement, article, editor, and more or browse each issue by date.
Date: 1892 to present

Science

Animal Science Image Gallery (http://anscigallery.nal.usda.gov)
Author: USDA National Agricultural Library & American Society of Animal Science
The Animal Science Image Gallery began as a partnership between the Animal Science Education Consortium (fifteen colleges and universities in the northeast and mid-Atlantic states) and the National Agriculture Library (NAL), funded (2003-2007) by a USDA Higher Education Challenge Grant.
Forest History Society Photograph Collections (http://www.foresthistory.org/Research/FHSPhotoGalleries.html)
Photographs from the first half of the Twentieth Century on a surprisingly wide range of subjects including the San Francisco Earthquake, the Boy Scouts and Farming.
National Digital Library (US Fish & Wildlife Service) (http://www.fws.gov/digitalmedia)
Author: U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service
Free online digital media library from US F&WS. Wide assortment of selected images, publications, video and audio clips that are in the public domain.
PrimateImages: Natural History Collection (http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/PCLNatHist/About.html)
The PrimateImages database is a collection of photographs and information about nonhuman primates. These images were contributed by numerous photographers through the Lawrence Jacobsen Library at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center, University of Wisconsin in an effort to preserve the visual record nonhuman primate species. This site contains photographs of most known primate species as well as related images such as habitat, maps and food sources.
Images database [NCBI] (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/images)

SEE ALSO Open-i listed below. The NCBI Images database is no longer directly searchable but can be accessed via searching in PubMed Central. Included are millions of scientific images from NCBI full text resources.

See "related" note below about the change.

Copyright Notice: These images are drawn from journal articles and other documents that are protected by copyright. The same copyright applies to the images. Some documents - a relatively small subset - are available with a Creative Commons or similar license that generally allows more liberal redistribution and reuse of the material. In the absence of a copyright or license statement to the contrary, users should assume that standard copyright protection applies. See the PMC copyright notice for more information.

Date: July 2012
Related:
  • Change to NCBI Images access (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/so10/so10_pm_display_ncbi_images.html#note)
    May 26, 2011: From NN/LM Pacific Southwest Region NCBI Images Database One of our Network members wondered if the NCBI Images database had disappeared because the link no longer worked. I checked the drop down menu in PubMed—the last location I had seen the Images database. It wasn’t there! Here’s the answer I received from CustServ: “The Images database was incorporated into PubMed Central (PMC). For example if you go to PMC and search for Protease-coupled PPIase assay, you will see on the right the “PMC Image Search” box. Then you can click on the images. Here’s the original announcement about the Images database for more details: Canese K. PubMed® Display Enhanced with Images from the New NCBI Images Database. NLM Tech Bull. 2010 Sep-Oct;(376):e14.

Multidisciplinary Collections

These collections are useful for Art, Science, History and more, but were not created with any single subject area in mind.
Calisphere (http://www.calisphere.universityofcalifornia.edu/)
"Calisphere is the University of California's free public gateway to a world of primary sources. More than 150,000 digitized items -- including photographs, documents, newspaper pages, political cartoons, works of art, diaries, transcribed oral histories, advertising, and other unique cultural artifacts -- reveal the diverse history and culture of California and its role in national and world history. Calisphere's content has been selected from the libraries and museums of the UC campuses, and from a variety of cultural heritage organizations." [from the website]
Europeana: Europe's Digital Library (http://www.europeana.eu)

Direct access to several million digital objects: film,photos, paintings, sound recordings, maps, manuscripts, books,newspapers and archival papers.

Selected from already digitized resources available in Europe's museums, libraries, archives and audio-visual collections. French and German cultural institutions are particularly well-represented.

Flickr Commons (http://www.flickr.com/commons)
A free public collection of photographs from major photography archives. Contributors include the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, the Biblioteca de Arte-Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Portugal),the Bibliothèque de Toulouse, and many others.
Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org/)
The Internet Archive is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. It includes large online collections of moving images, music and audio recordings.
Related:
  • The Wayback Machine (http://www.archive.org/web/web.php)
    allows you to locate archived versions of web pages that may no longer be available on the active Internet.
Online Archive of California (OAC) (http://www.oac.cdlib.org/)
The OAC brings together historical materials from a variety of California institutions, including museums, historical societies, and archives. It includes searchable finding aids for collections held in these institutions as well as a large selection of scanned images and documents from these collections.
UC Image Service (http://imageservice.cdlib.org/)
The UC Image Service provides digital image collections and robust tools in support of teaching, learning, and research for faculty and students of the University of California. This page describes all the image collections accessed through the UC Image Service; it also has links to more information about the Image Service itself.
Related:
  • Luna Commons (http://www.lunacommons.org/)
    Some of the public collections listed here are also offered through a new, easier-to-use Web site.
Visual Collections: Images of Art, History and Culture (http://www.davidrumsey.com/collections/other.html)
This is a list of image collections in architecture,the fine arts, cartography, history and more--all freely available. Representative collections include: The Museum and Online Archive of California; The Estate Project for Artists with Aids; Maps of Africa; The Comer Archive of Chicago (photographs);The Farber Gravestone Collection. Many of these are accessible through the UC Image Service (imageservice.cdlib.org).
Academic Search Complete [via EBSCO] (http://uclibs.org/PID/126936) [Restricted] VPN
Primarily a multidisciplinary article index, Academic Search Complete also includes a sizable collection of miscellaneous images. In order to search the image collection in this database, click "More" in the top toolbar and select "Images"
Coverage: 1887-present
Related:

Copyright

Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States [via Cornell University] (http://copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm)
Author: Peter B. Hirtle
An excellent summary of when copyrighted works enter the public domain.
Digital Image Rights Computator (DIRC) [via the VRA] (http://www.vraweb.org/resources/ipr/dirc/index.html)
Author: Visual Resources Association
The DIRC is an interactive decision tree program to help you determine what you need to do to legally use a specific image for a specific purpose. At each stage it has a brief description of the issue at hand as well as links for more detailed discussions of those issues.
Copyright, Museums, and Licensing of Art Images [columbia University] (http://copyright.columbia.edu/copyright/2011/06/27/copyright-museums-and-licensing-of-art-images/)
Author: Kenneth Crews and Melissa A. Brown

Crews, director of the Columbia University Copyright Advisory Office, recently (June, 2011)published a series of studies on this subject. Topics include:

  • “Control of Museum Art Images: The Reach and Limits of Copyright and Licensing”
  • “Art Image Copyright and Licensing: Compilation and Summary of Museum Policies”
  • “Art Image Copyright and Licensing: Terms and Conditions Governing Reproduction and Distribution”
  • “Art Image Copyright and Licensing: Terms and Conditions Governing Appearance and Composition of Images”
  • “Art Image Copyright and Licensing: Terms and Conditions Governing Third Party Rights”
  • “Art Image Copyright and Licensing: Bibliography”

This work was funded by a grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.

Date: June, 2011

Other Resources

Art and Art History Internet Resources [via UC Davis Library] (http://www.lib.ucdavis.edu/dept/hss/arthistory/arthistory-internet-resources.php)
A somewhat dated but still useful selection of free Art and Art History Web sites. Includes online encyclopedias and biographical indexes as well as image collections.
Fashion, Costume, and Textiles Subject Guide [via UC Davis Library] (http://www.lib.ucdavis.edu/dept/hss/resources/guides/fashiontextiles.php)
This pathfinder provides information on reference books, internet resources, suggested subject headings, and related library subject guides available from Shields Library.
Librarian's Index to the Internet (http://lii.org/)
Provides a well-organized point of access for reliable, trustworthy, librarian-selected Internet resources.