Open Web Resources
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360º Tours 360º panoramic views and virtual tours of selected European and Middle Eastern cities and Ancient Near Eastern archaeological sites.
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AP Newsroom AP Newsroom (formerly AP Images) contains millions of photographs dating from 1826 to present day from the Associated Press. Includes thousands of graphics, audio files dating from the 1920s, and news stories and headlines from 1997 to the present.
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ACOR Photo Archive (American Center of Oriental Research, Amman, Jordan) An online archive of historical images from across the Middle East, and a representative record of Jordan’s archeological and social history spanning from 1955 to the early 2000s.
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American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) Center for Art and Archaeology Photo Archives
- Archnet A portal to images, and scholarly resources on architecture, urbanism, environmental and landscape design, visual culture, and conservation issues related to the Muslim world.
- Art Institute of Chicago Includes over 44,000 open access digital images of artworks in the museum’s wide-ranging collections.
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Art Resource Art Resource is the clearing house for the rights of major European an American museums, archives and collections.
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Art UK (Arts Council England) The ambition behind Art UK is to show as much of the UK’s national art collection as possible.
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Asian Art Museum Online Collection The Asian Art Museum (in San Francisco)'s online collection database includes over 3000 South and Southeast Asian objects, with information and images.
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Black History & Culture (Getty Images) Provides free, non-commercial access to historical and cultural images of the African/Black Diaspora in the US and UK from the 19th century to present day.
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Bridgeman Images With images from over 8,000 collections and more than 29,000 artists, Bridgeman Images represents international museums, galleries and artists by providing a central source of fine art for image users.
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The British Library Flickr Commons Photostream Images scanned from the pages of 17th, 18th and 19th century books in the British Library. Includes a fashion & costume image set.
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British Library Online Gallery This online gallery contains over 30,000 images from the British Library's collection. You can view online exhibits, search images, and create an account to save images in your own personal gallery and assign tags.
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Cooper Hewitt Collection Thirty centuries of historic and contemporary design.
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Creative Commons Search Searches several sources of Creative Commons media at once, including Flickr, Google, Yahoo, and Wikimedia Commons.
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Digital Public Library of America The Digital Public Library of America is a portal to the digital collections of America’s libraries, archives, and museums.
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Dumbarton Oaks Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives Links to: Byzantine Photograph Collections, Moving Image Collections, Garden and Landscape Collections, and more!
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Europeana A digitized multimedia library of the European cultural heritage: digitized books, manuscripts, photos, paintings, maps, audio and film material, newspapers, etc.
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Fabergé Collection (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts) VMFA’s extensive Russian decorative arts collection is in large part attributed to one donor, Mrs. Lillian Thomas Pratt, whose collection of more than 400 Russian decorative arts objects all began with a fork.
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Flickr Commons A free public collection of photographs from major photography archives. Contributors include the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, and more.
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Folger Shakespeare Library Digital Collections Images of our early printed books, manuscripts, and art related to Shakespeare.
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France-England: Medieval Manuscripts between 700 and 1200 800 medieval manuscripts produced between the 8th and 12th centuries, digitized and cataloged by the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the British Library.
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Frick Digital Image Archive The Archive provides public access to The Frick Collection and Frick Art Reference Library's digital assets, including research collections of the library, museum images from the Frick Collection, and historical documents, photographs, and movies from the Frick Family archives.
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George Eastman House Photography Collection Collection includes more than 400,000 photographs and negatives dating from the invention of photography to the present day. The collection represents over 14,000 photographers including nearly all major figures in the history of photography.
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Getty Research Institute Digital Collections Digital Collections provide free access to a growing number of digitized items from the Research Library, Special Collections, Photo Archive, and Institutional Archives. These materials include photographs, and other documents relating to Los Angeles and Southern California
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A Guide to the Web's Growing Set of Free Image Collections A guide to museums and research institutions that have large, high-quality, free-to-use collection of historically or aesthetically notable images online
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Harry Ransom Center Digital Collections The University of Texas at Austin's Harry Ransom Center holdings "provide a unique record of the creative process of writers and artists, deepening our understanding of literature, photography, film, art, and the performing arts."
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HeritageGateway Information on England's historic sites and buildings, including images of listed buildings.
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Huntington Digital Library. From the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens
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Islamic Painted Page A database of Persian, Ottoman, Arab and Mughal paintings, illuminations, decorated Qur'an pages, and book bindings from over 270 collections worldwide.
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J. Willis Sayre Photographs 24,000 photographs of performing arts and artists digitized by the University of Washington Libraries Special Collections Division and Digital Initiatives unit.
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Kyoto Costume Institute Digital Archive KCI's Digital Archive includes a browseable interface to view costumes by time period from the early 18th century to the mid-20th century.
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Library of Congress Digital Collections From the Library of Congress, including many photographs and other visual elements documenting American history.
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Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Catalog Images on a wide array of topics, many in the public domain.
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LIFE Photo Archive Growing historical photo archive for LIFE magazine, hosted by Google.
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Los Angeles County Museum of Art: Search the Collections An online catalogue of LACMA collections, with images.
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Louvre Collections Database Search more than 480,000 works in the Musée du Louvre and Musée National Eugène-Delacroix. Updated on a daily basis, it is the result of the continuous research and documentation efforts carried out by teams of experts from both museums.
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Luna Commons Hundreds of thousands of images made available from reputable sources for educational and public use.
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Margaret Herrick Library Digital Collections This series of collections includes personal papers, the Academy Awards collection, photographs, periodicals, sheet music, and more.
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Masterpieces of Indian Art & Architecture An introduction to 2000 years of art on the Indian subcontinent, compiled by Columbia University's Department of Art History and Archaeology.
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Material Objects Archive Images from Yale University's Initiative for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion (MAVCOR).
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Medieval England and France, 700–1200 A curated selection of digitized medieval illuminated manuscripts set in their cultural and historical context and explored in a range of articles.
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The Medieval Kingdom of Sicily Image Database A Visual Resource of Historical Sites c. 1100 - c. 1450
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Metropolitan Museum of Art The Collection Online. (Over 400,000 museums objects, over 270,000 with images)
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Museum of Domestic Design & Architecture Search for images by object name, color, style, or design component.
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Museum of Modern Art Collection Includes images for 59,000 works of modern and contemporary art.
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Museum of the City of New York Explore New York’s past through images and objects from the collections of the Museum of the City of New York. Includes Broadway theater production files.
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National Gallery of Art. NGA Images More than 20,000 open access digital images up to 3000 pixels each are available free of charge for download and use.
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National Palace Museum Digital Collection Selections from the National Palace Museum, Taipei City, Taiwan
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National Portrait Gallery (London) Over 100,000 portraits from the Gallery’s Collection, including paintings, photographs, drawings, prints and sculptures. Over 53,000 low-resolution images are available free of charge to non-commercial users through a standard ‘Creative Commons’ license and over 87,000 high-resolution images are available free of charge for academic use through the Gallery’s own licenses.
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Olmsted Archives, Frederick Law Olmsted's NHS NPS's Flickr Photostream
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Parker Library on the Web Images of 6th-18th century manuscripts from the historic Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Subjects represented include music, literature, theology, medieval travelogues and maps, and historical chronicles.
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Paul Mellon Centre Photographic Archive Features over 100,000 photographs of British paintings, sculpture, architecture and the decorative arts, as well as images of sketchbooks and exhibitions.
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People's Graphic Design Archive A crowd-sourced virtual archive that aims to expand, diversify, and preserve graphic design history. It includes finished projects, process, correspondence, oral histories, articles, and other material in the form of images, documents, videos, audio, as well as links to other relevant archives and websites.
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Picturing Places Topographical views, maps and texts from over 500 examples from the British Library’s collections and beyond.
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Project REVEAL (Read and View English & American Literature) The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin has adopted an open access policy, removing the requirement for permission and use fees for a significant portion of its online collections believed to be in the public domain.
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Ross Archive of African Images James J. Ross Archive of African Images 1590 - 1920. A database of published images of African art.
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Saul Bass Archive Silkscreen posters, film posters, and more.
- Scala Archives Scala Archives is one of the largest fine art image archives worldwide. Transparencies and high resolution digital files of works of art from all over the world, covering every age and every field of visual arts are available for licensing to all media. The Library contains thousands of works from Europe, the United States, Russia, the Middle and Far East, and Africa, with an emphasis on Italian art.
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Smithsonian Institution: Open F|S More than 40,000 works being made available for high-resolution download from the Freer and Sackler Galleries Digitized Collections and the Freer Study Collection.
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Smithsonian Libraries Image Gallery Books illustrations, photos, drawings, and other images from across the Libraries.
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Smithsonian Open Access Smithsonian Open Access allows users to download, share, and reuse millions of digital items from the Smithsonian’s collections. This includes images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.
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Texas Digital Archive: Prints and Photographs Collections composed entirely of photographs and other printed images created or collected by individuals and non-governmental organizations connected to Texas.
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Thomas J. Watson Library Digital Collections Digital Collections include: Metropolitan Museum of Art Publications, Rare Materials in The Metropolitan Museum of Art Libraries, Auction Catalogs, Cloisters Archives Collection, Costume Institute Collections, Fine Bindings, Japanese Illustrated Books, and Manuscript Collections.
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Time & Life Pictures The collection includes 425,000 digital files of iconic images from the 20th century that have adorned the pages of Time, Life, and other Time Inc. publications.
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Timeline of Art History The Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History presents the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection via a chronological, geographical, and thematic exploration of global art history.
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USC Pacific Asia Museum: Explore the Collections Online catalogue of materials held by the Pacific Asia Museum, with images.
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VADS Thousands of visual arts images, including fashion, design, prints, and sculpture.
- VIRCONA: a Catalog of Native American Artists A web-accessible subset of the Native American entries in the electronic catalog to the collections in the Bunting Visual Resources Library at the University of New Mexico, with more than 1000 thumbnail images artwork.
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Virtual Museum of Images and Sounds A virtual museum created by using the resources of two archives of the American Institute of Indian Studies – the Center for Art and Archaeology and the Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology.
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Virtual Textile Project An open access project with images made available for research, inspiration, and other non-commercial uses.
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Web Gallery of Art Provides access to over 29.000 reproductions of European painting and sculpture of the Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassicism, Romanticism periods (1000-1850).
- Wellcome Images Includes over 100,000 high-quality images from the clinical and biomedical sciences, selected from the UK's leading teaching hospitals and research institutions.
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What was Where A growing collection of historical photographs linked to their locations (on Google Maps).
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White House Art Collection The collection of fine art at the White House includes more than 500 works of art, selected for their historical and cultural significance.
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The Wolfsonian-Florida International University, Digital Collections The Wolfsonian's collections comprise approximately 180,000 objects from 1850–1950, documenting modern material culture and illustrating the persuasive power of art and design. An excellent source of propaganda art.
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- AP Newsroom AP Newsroom (formerly AP Images) contains millions of photographs dating from 1826 to present day from the Associated Press. Includes thousands of graphics, audio files dating from the 1920s, and news stories and headlines from 1997 to the present.
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- ARTstor High-resolution Images in the arts, architecture, humanities, and social sciences. Includes a suite of software tools to view, present, and manage images for research and teaching purposes. Images are contributed by museums, photographers, libraries, scholars, photo archives, artists, and estates, from a variety of sources including the Hartill Archive of Architecture and Allied Arts. UC campuses contribute additional images including: the Archivision Library, Saskia Art & Architecture images, the Visual Resources Collections from UCB, UCSB, UCI, UCLA, UCR, and the UCSC Library Instructional Collection. Now hosted on the JSTOR platform.
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Calisphere Over one million photographs, documents, letters, artwork, diaries, oral histories, films, advertisements, musical recordings, and more from the collections digitized and contributed by all ten campuses of the University of California and other important libraries, archives, and museums throughout the state.
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UCLA Library Digital Collections Rare and unique digital materials developed by the UCLA Library to support education, research, service, and creative expression, including the AIDS Poster Collection, the Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive and more.