Table of Contents
Art Images
ARTstor
A very large subscription-based database; offers images pertaining to the arts and related disciplines: anthropology, archaeology, history, etc. The images are of high resolution and generally good quality and are always accompanied by descriptive metadata. Searching is by keyword and can be limited by date, location, and medium, or specific collection. Images can be resized, saved, and downloaded.
VRC Imagebase
Stanford's Visual Resources Center Imagebase contains over 90,000 primarily art historical images. In addition to the quick search box, you can explore by browsing collections that have been sorted by department, faculty name, medium, country, and style.
WorldImages
Maintained by San Jose State University, the WorldImages database provides access to the California State University IMAGE Project. It contains approximately 80,000 images, is global in coverage, and includes all areas of visual imagery.
Archives of American Art Image Gallery
A subset of the Archives of American Art's Collections Online, the images collection includes photographic images of artists, exhibition installations, manuscripts, and events.
The Athenaeum
The Athenaeum is a crowd-sourced collection of approximately 50,000 images. Subject matter is currently limited to European and American paintings and works on paper. Copyright and fair use advice accompanies images for which these conditions apply.
Visual Arts Data Service
A UK-based source for art historical image collections, the VADS site brings together resources from British cultural institutions for the purposes of access and preservation. It is particularly strong in the areas of material culture and design. Copyright restrictions vary by collection; ample explanatory information is provided.
Historical Images
Image Gallery
The Image Gallery provides access to various digital collections owned by the Stanford Libraries, including the David Rumsey Collection (maps), the Douglas Menuez Photography Collection, the Herbert Matter Photograph Collection, Medieval Manuscript Fragments, the Stanford Historical Photograph Collection, and the The Reid W. Dennis Collection of California Lithographs.
Calisphere
This site is powered by the California Digital Library and draws from the its online collections of photographs, maps, and other primary sources relating to California culture and history. See also the Online Archive of California, where you can search the same images in the context of the archival collections from which they have been drawn.
American Memory
This historical collection is the Library of Congress's key contribution to the National Digital Library. The site offers various aspects of the collection, including digital reproductions, a finding aid in the form of a catalog or register, and other accompaniments. It includes collections of photographs, recorded sound, motion pictures, and manuscripts; more materials are becoming available over time. After searching the collections, click on Gallery View to see the image results.
NYPL Digital Gallery
The New York Public Library’s Digital Gallery provides access to over 800,000 images digitized from the Library's holdings of manuscripts, posters, photographs, prints, maps, etc. Images can be browsed from within their contextual collections (e.g., After Columbus: Four Hundred Years of Native American Portraiture; “The Pageant of America” Photograph Archive) or via basic and advanced keyword search interfaces.
Smithsonian Collections Search Center
This Smithsonian meta-search engine provides access to 7.98 million catalog records with 816,516 images, video and sound files, electronic journals, and other resources from the Smithsonian's museums, archives & libraries.
Science and News Images
SpringerImages
SpringerImages is a growing collection of scientific images that spans the scientific, technical and medical fields. The continually updated collection gathers photos, graphs, histograms, figures, and tables, and is available as a searchable online database. The SpringerImages interface enables users to search through captions, keywords, context and more, even jumping from the image to the source article. Users can create personalized image "sets " and can easily export images for use in their own presentations or lectures.
U.S. National Science Foundation Multimedia Gallery
A collection of images, video, and audio relating to the National Science Foundation's research in science and engineering
MD Consult
MD consult provides access to textbooks, electronic journals, practice guidelines, drug information, and patient education handouts. It also provides access to 50,000 medical images. To search the images only, change the Search drop-down menu from "All Sections" to "Images."
NOAA Photo Library
A collection of downloadable public domain photos, maps, and illustrations produced by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
AP Images
AP Images is one of the world's largest collections of historical and contemporary imagery, with a 50 million-image print and negative archive. As an essential source of photographs and graphics for professional image buyers, AP Images strives to meet the needs of today's global customer through superior image quality, selection and service. Covers the major news events photographed from the 1840s to today.
Magnum Photos
Magnum Photos is a cooperative that provides photographs to the press, publishers, advertising, television, galleries and museums across the world. The Magnum Photos library houses all the work produced by Magnum photographers and some special collections by non-members. There are approximately one million photographs in both print and transparency in the physical library, with over 500,000 images available online. These images may be licensed for editorial and commercial use; they are not specifically licensed for academic use. All images are under copyright.
Citing Images
Several universities provide excellent guides to citing images in papers and presentations. Two standouts are:
Colgate University's Visual Resources Library (MLA, Chicago, APA)
Dartmouth College Library [pdf] (MLA, Chicago, APA)
In general, the following details are necessary for any image citation, no matter which citation style you choose:
* The title of the image, if applicable. For example, this could be the title of the artwork or, if it's a media image, the original caption.
* The name of the image's creator.
* The repository of the image. This is the institution that owns the original: the museum, the library, the archive, the individual, etc.
* The source. This could be a database such as ARTstor, a Web site, a book, etc.
* The date you accessed the image. This is most important for Web sources, which can be quite ephemeral.
Copyright Resources
The Art & Architecture Library's Visual Resources Center uses the Image Collection Guidelines published by the Visual Resources Association and the Provost's yearly Copyright Reminder as its primary copyright guidelines.
Other Copyright Resources:
* Copy Photography Computator, created by A. Kohl.
* Copyright and Art Issues, Christine L. Sundt, University of Oregon
* Intellectual Property and the Arts, moderated by the College Art Association
* Fair Use, the Stanford Libraries' website on Fair Use
* Use the VRA 's Digital Image Rights Computator (DIRC) to determine the intellectual property rights status of the image you intend to use.
