search engines, directories :: licensed images :: fair-use, open access sites :: commercial sources :: vrf image database

Search Engines & Directories
· Google Image Search
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Google Scholar (beta)
"Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.(source: http://scholar.google.com)


· Yahoo Advanced Image Search

· Picsearch
Picsearch connects its users to the vast visual resources of the internet. Picsearch uses its own technology to crawl the web and has created a searchable index of images. When a user sends a query to Picsearch the result is received as a set of thumbnail images that are sorted to ensure that they are as highly relevant as possible. When the user clicks on a thumbnail they are linked to the original web site where that image is located. (source: http://www.picsearch.com)
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Licensed Images
ARTstor
"The ARTstor Library is a collection of collections. It is the product of a growing number of collection development partnerships with individuals and institutions in the US and abroad" (www.artstor.org). ARTStor is a library of digital images, associated information, and software tools designed to enhance teaching, learning and scholarship. It currently contains a searchable database of about 500,000 digital images that span 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. UCD IP only.
Some of the collections:

  · Image Gallery
More than one quarter of a million images offering a broad overview of world art, architecture, and visual culture, as well as many specialized collections. A partial list includes: Larry Qualls Archive of Contemporary Art, the American Council for Southern Asian Art, Cuban Heritage Collection, the Giza Archaeological Expedition Archive, Hill Ornithology Collection, Illuminated Manuscripts from Princeton University Library, the Blair, Bloom and Denny Collection of Islamic Art and Architecture, and Scala Archives of Italian and European Art.

Museums: Art Institute of Chicago, Cleveland Museum of Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and others.
For a complete list: http://www.artstor.org/info/collections/imagegallery.jsp
· Art History Survey Collection
Contains 4,000 images that have been defined on the basis of an "overlap concordance" based on 13 standard art history survey texts, some consulted in multiple editions.
· Carnegie Arts of the United States
The "Arts of the United States" collection, consisting of more than 4,200 high resolution images, richly documents the history of American art, architecture, visual and material culture.
· Hartill (also located in Insight (below))
The "Hartill Archive of Architecture and Allied Arts" collection, consisting of nearly 17,000 high-resolution images, richly documents the architectural history of the Western world from earliest antiquity through the present, and from the Middle East to the Americas.
· Huntington Archive of Asian Art
The John C. and Susan L. Huntington Archive of Buddhist and Related Art at Ohio State University contains nearly 300,000 color slides and black and white photographs of Asian art and architecture taken by art historians John and Susan Huntington over nearly three decades both in the field and in museums. Countries covered in the collection include India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, China, Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, and Myanmar. Works photographed date from 3000 B.C. through the present. A large number of the photographs document monuments, architecture, and art works that have since been destroyed, stolen, lost, or modified.
· Illustrated Bartsch
The Illustrated Bartsch collection offers more than 50,000 images of old master European prints (engravings, etchings, woodcuts, etc.) from the 15th Century to the early 19th Century, embodying the work of hundreds of printmakers.
· Mellon International Dunhuang Archive (MIDA)
The Mellon International Dunhuang Archive (MIDA) is the product of a major and ongoing multi-institutional, multi-national effort to create high-quality digital reconstructions of the mural paintings and related art and texts associated with the several hundred Buddhist cave shrines in Dunhuang, China, a uniquely important cultural crossroads on the ancient Silk Route in the Gobi Desert.
· Museum of Modern Architectyre and Design Collection
The MoMA "Digital Design Collection" consists of approximately 6,200 works (represented by approximately 8,000 digital images) from the Department of Architecture and Design of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. International in scope, and one of the foremost collections of its kind, The MoMA Architecture and Design collection includes architectural drawings, models, and photographs, graphic design materials such as posters, and three-dimensional objects such as appliances, furniture, tableware, tools, textiles, and sports cars.
· Native American Art and Culture, National Anthropoligical Archives, Smithsonian Institution
The "Native American Art and Culture" collection has two components. The first, now available to ARTstor users, consists of more than 10,000 high-resolution images made from historic photographs richly documenting Native American subjects (portraits, scenes, etc.).
· Schlesinger History of Women in America Collection
The Schlesinger History of Women in America collection is the product of a partnership between ARTstor and the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library, Harvard University. The collection embraces approximately 36,000 high quality digital images from the Schlesinger Library's renowned photographic archives.

UC Image Service Collections
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. Most collections require users to download Insight Java Client on campus and a VPN or proxy from off-campus. Please note that all computers in the Visual Resources Facility have Insight Java Client installed. Collections:

  · David Rumsey Historical Map Collection
Contains 11,000+ images, primarily of 18th and 19th century maps, globes, atlases, maritime charts of North and South America
· Estate Project for Artists with Aids
Contains 3,000+ images of works from artists with HIV/AIDS
· Farber Gravestone Collection
13,527 images of gravestone sculpture from New England, mostly prior to 1800
· Hartill
Contains 16,660 images of architecture of the western world, middle east and the Americas from ancient to contemporary periods.
· Hoover Institution Poster Collection (Stanford)
53 images of Russian and Soviet Union 20th century political posters
· Japanese Historical Maps
896 images of early maps of Japan and the world
· LUCI (Library of UC Images)
Contains 3,690 images covering ancient Greek and Roman antiquities and California art and architecture
· Museum of the Online Archive of California (MOAC)
77,193 historic and fine arts images from 8 California archives and museums
· Saskia
26,000+ images of art and architecture worldwide. Contains core teaching images covering ancient to contemporary periods and works from prestigious museum collections. Note: Insight does not contain the most recent additions to the Saskia archive.
· SPIRO: Arch+Arts+Places
65,000+ images of architecture, landscape design, urban planning worldwide. Ancient to contemporary periods covered
· Tebtunis Papyri
Contains 55 images of Egyptian papyri evacuated at the site of ancient Tebtunis
· UCSF Demonstration Project
99 medical and dental images from the UCSF Medical School
AccuNet Associated Press Photo Archive
The Archive is a primary source database from the Associated Press
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Fair-Use and Open Access Sites
 

· A&A Art and Architecture [Courtauld Institute of Art]
Over 40,000 images available.
· American Memory [Library of Congress]
American Memory provides free and open access through the Internet to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience. It is a digital record of American history and creativity. These materials, from the collections of the Library of Congress and other institutions, chronicle historical events, people, places, and ideas that continue to shape America, serving the public as a resource for education and lifelong learning. (source: American Memory)
· ArchNet [School of Architecture & Planning, MIT & School of Architecture, University of Texas, Austin]
ArchNet is an international online community for architects, planners, urban designers, landscape architects, conservationists, and scholars, with a focus on Muslim cultures and civilisations.
· Art Images for College Teaching (AICT) [Minneapolis College of Art & Design]
AICT is a non-profit project created by Allan T. Kohl, author, art historian and visual resources curator at the Minneapolis Colllege of Art & Design. AICT is intended primarily to disseminate images of art and architectural works in the public domain on a free-access, free-use basis to all levels of the educational community, as well as to the public at large. The images displayed have been photographed on location by the author, who consents to their use in any application that is both educational and non-commercial in nature. AICT's emphasis is on ancient, medieval and Renaissance European art and architecture. (source: AICT)
· Calisphere (UC)
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. (source: http://www.calisphere.universityofcalifornia.edu/about-cs.html)
· Catena: Digital Archive of Historic Gardens + Landscapes [Bard Graduate Center]
Catena, the Digital Archive of Historic Gardens and Landscapes and its companion website, is envisioned as part of a larger, typologically organized archive of digital images with accompanying educational materials. The initial component of Catena is built around the villa, an important landscape type in garden history. Its purpose is to serve as an educational tool for teachers and scholars of landscape history affiliated with schools and universities. The images and intellectual content on this site should be used for educational purposes only.
· Cities/Buildings Database [University of Washington]
The Cities/Buildings Database is a collection of digitized images of buildings and cities drawn from across time and throughout the world, available to students, researchers and educators on the web. Begun in 1995, the database was conceived as a multi-disciplinary resources for the academic community. It has grown steadily with contributions from a wide range of scholars and now contains over 5000 images ranging from New York to Central Asia, from African villages to the Parc de la Villette and Frank Gehry conceptual sketches. (source: C/T Database)
· Compass, British Museum
Contains around 5000 objects from the collection.
· CORSAIR [Pierpont Morgan Library]
The Library's collections are rich and eclectic. Areas of strength include Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, drawings and prints, literary and historical manuscripts, music manuscripts and printed scores, bindings and printed books, ancient Near Eastern seals and tablets, and art objects.
· Database of Virtual Art
The Database of Virtual Art documents the rapidly evolving field of digital installation art. This complex, research-oriented overview of immersive, interactive, telematic and genetic art has been developed in cooperation with established media artists, researchers and institutions.
· Decorative Arts & Material Culture [University of Wisconsin-Madison]
The Digital Library for the Decorative Arts and Material Culture collects electronic resources for study and research of the decorative arts, with a particular focus on Early America. Included are electronic texts and journals, image databases, and information on organizations, museums and research facilities.
· Digital South Asia Library [American Institute of Indian Studies]
The web presentation of the AIIS photographic archive is a joint venture of the AIIS and the Digital South Asia Library project. The database provides, images, maps, statistics, reference sources, bibliographies, indexes etc. The original AIIS collection is organized into four separate collections, architecture, sculpture, paintings and numismatics. The web version of the AIIS photograph archive has combined these four collections into one for ease of searching and display.
· Eastman Photos Catalog [UC Davis, Shields Library, Special Collection]
Online collection of photographs, negatives and postcards for a wide variety of northern California locations, events.
· Great Buildings Online
This 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. For up-to-the-moment coverage of the latest buildings, designers, ideas, and trends, GreatBuildings.com is richly cross-linked with ArchitectureWeek, the leading architecture magazine online, and Archiplanet, the community-created all-buildings collection.
For complete access to the entire Great Buildings Online resource, please sign on to Computers PC 1 and PC 2 in the Visual Resources Facility.
· Image Exchange [Society of Architectural Historians]
SAH members contribute their own slides of buildings and things they could volunteer for shared educational use. These are scanned at a consistent standard, and made available freely to members and students over the Web for non-profit educational use, for use on monitors and through projection in the classroom. SAH has focused on a world survey and is now working on an American architecture pilot. (source: SAH Image Exchange)
· ImageBase [Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco]
The ImageBase is a searchable image and text database of objects from the collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (the de Young Museum and the Legion of Honor). The collections (110,000+ objects) belong to the people of the City and County of San Francicso. The ImageBase is an expression of the Museum's mission to provide meaningful public access to the collections and behave more like a resource and less like a repository. (source: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco)
· International Dunhuang Project (IDP)
' IDP is a ground-breaking international collaboration based at the British Library to make information and images of more than 100,000 manuscripts, paintings, textiles and artefacts from Dunhuang and other Silk Road sites freely available on the Internet.' [IDP]
· Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum's collection now contains more than two million works of art from all points of the compass, ancient through modern times. About 6,500 objects—highlights from each of the Museum's curatorial departments as well as the entire Department of European Paintings and the entire Department of American Paintings and Sculpture—can be accessed online. (source: Met. Museum)
· Mother of All Art History Links Page, Image Collections and Online Art [School of Art & Design, University of Michigan]
· Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Currently provides 330,320 digital images of objects form their collection (450,000).
· Museums of the Online Archive of California (MOAC) [California Digital Library]
The MOAC collection contains nearly 38,000 images from 7 California museums and libraries -- Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive, Japanese American National Museum, Oakland Museum of California, Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology, Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, UC Berkeley Bancroft Library, UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts. It is also accessed using the Luna Insight interface (see Licensed Images).
· National Gallery
The National Gallery's permanent collection consists of Western European paintings dating from about 1250 onwards. The entire National Gallery permanent collection and long-term loans are illustrated and described in the collection online.
· National Gallery of Art
Collection Database Search page. Text and/or data on all of the 110,000 objects (6,000 images available) in the National Gallery of Art's collection are searchable.
· Online Archive of California (OAC) [California Digital Library]
The OAC brings together historical materials from a variety of California institutions, including museums, historical societies, and archives. Over 120,000 images; 50,000 pages of documents, letters, and oral histories; and 8,000 guides to collections are available. (source: OAC)
· Photomuse [George Eastman House, International Center of Photography Alliance]
PhotoMuse.org, the collaborative website of the George Eastman House and International Center of Photography Alliance, is currently under development. This version is a prototype. Research continues on both the database back end and the design of the front end.
· The Picture Collection Online [New York Public Library]
The Picture Collection Online (PCO) is a select group of images from The New York Public Library, Mid-Manhattan Library, Picture Collection. It is a collection of 30,000 digitized images from books, magazines and newspapers as well as original photographs, prints and postcards, mostly created before 1923.
· The Perseus Digital Library [Classics Department, Tufts University]
Perseus is an evolving digital library, engineering interactions through time, space, and language. PDL's primary goal is to bring a wide range of source materials to as large an audience as possible. PDL anticipates that greater accessibility to the sources for the study of the humanities will strengthen the quality of questions, lead to new avenues of research, and connect more people through the connection of ideas. (source: Perseus Digital Library)
· Smithsonian Institute
Among the institutions with searchable online collections: African Art Museum, Freer-Sackler Gallery of Art (over 6,000 images online), American Art Museum, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (2,000 images), Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum an the National Portrait Gallery (12,000 records).
· SPIRO
SPIRO is the visual online public access catalog to the 35mm slide collection of the Architecture Visual Resouces Library at UC Berkeley. SPIRO contains approximately 65,000 digital images. Only thumbnails are availble through the web. For larger images, see Licensed Images
· World Wide Web Virtual Library: History of Art, Large Image Collections
The History of Art Virtual Library is a collection of links related to Art History and computer applications in Art History. The site is sponsored by CHArt, the Computer and History of Art Group. This site is directed at anyone interested in art but has a special focus on the academic study of Art History.
· WorldImages [San Jose State University]
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 500 portfolios. (source: WorldImages)

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Commercial Sources
Scholars Resource
  · Saskia, Ltd
Saskia, Ltd. is the leading provider of high-quality images for the teaching of art history. The archive has now grown to 30,750 images (35mm and digital). The Saskia archive is used successfully in introductory courses as well as specialized seminars of Art History and has enhanced a broad range of art history pedagogy and many other disciplines. See also Licensed Images.
· Bridgeman Education (The Giraudon Image Collection)
The Bridgeman Art Library works with museums, art galleries and artists to make available an archive of images drawn from collections throughout the world. Giraudon, the prestigious French picture archive, deals specifically in fine art, history, architecture and archaeology. It contains images from thousands of collections depicting the art and culture of every continent. French art features strongly and highlights include Impressionist works from the Musée Marmottan-Monet, Paris, the Louvre, Musée d’Orsay and regional French collections.
· Archivision Digital Archive
Intended for in-depth research and analysis by students of architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, archaeology, art and art history. The archive consists mainly of architecture.
· Davis Art Images
Formerly Rosenthal Art Slides. Oriented to meet the needs of art historians and art instructors. The archive spans the history of art with strengths in American Art, Art of the Americas and Contemporary Art and Architecture.
· Hartill Art Associates
Contains more than 16,000 high resolution images derived from 35mm slides. The archive consists mainly of architecture and architectural sculpture from Prehistoric to Contemporary periods. See also Licensed Images.

Asian Art Photographic Distribution (AAPD)
AAPD is a not-for-profit distributor of visual resource materials administered by the Department of Art History, University of Michigan. Provide 35mm slides only (digital images available throught ARTstor).

American Council for Southern Asian Art (ACSAA)
ACSAA is a not-for-profit distributor of visual resource materials administered by the Department of Art History, University of Michigan. Provide 35mm slides only (digital images available throught ARTstor).

Art on File
Archive focus is contemporary architecture and public sculpture. Provide 35mm and/or digital images.

British Museum Images
Designed to be fast and efficient, Images provides access to one of the largest museums in the world. As collection is digitized, newly digitized images will be added to Images database.

Canyon Lights World Art Image Bank
Provides 35mm slides and photographic prints for educators, archives, editors and publishers. Digital images will be available through ARTstor.

Corbis
Corbis offers more than 100 million creative, entertainment and historic images. While there are some royalty free images, most are rights-managed. Among the rights managed collections are theAndy Warhol Foundation, Ansel Adams, Conde Nast and Bettman Collection.

Pictures of Record
Publishes scholarly images for teaching anthropology, history, art history, archaeology and other disciplines. 35mm and digital images available.

Scala Archives
A prestigous collection of professional images of art and culture for use in publishing, advertising and education. Provide both 35mm and digital images.
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Visual Resources Facility Image Database
The Visual Resource Facillity's Image Database provides access to the Department's digital image and media collections. Please note that the site and database are under construction and subject to change.

The Image Database supports access to these collections through several search options: artist names, geographic place names, title/object names, period/style, subject terms, image source, and collection accession number. There are two types basic search types: Image Search and Item Search. An Image Search allows users to search for works of art or material culture while the Item Search enables searches of specific slides or surrogates of works of art.

Anyone can access the Image Database online. Only campus users or individuals with login passwords can view images. Thumbnail (144 pixel length) and medium images (800 pixel length) are accessible throughout campus for any user without a password. Students and faculty wanting access to larger image files (up to 2048 pixels) must apply for a password with the Visual Resource Facility staff or visit the Visual Resource Facility in Art 203 where large files are viewable and downloadable.

The Image Database is intended for educational purposes only and is subject to copyright restrictions. These materials may not be used for other purposes without permission from the Visual Resource Facility staff.


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