Subject Guide
Help Menu
- Library Catalog This link opens in a new windowSearch our library catalog (aka OneSearch) for all types of sources. It combines results from many of our databases. (Ex Libris)
- OneSearch This link opens in a new windowUse this discovery tool to search most of the University Libraries' collections, including books, journal articles, newspapers, dissertations, music, and video recordings. (Ex Libris)
Welcome
Welcome to the Image Research Guide. There are a variety of topics covered in this guide: searching for images, requesting images, using your images, storing your images, and copyright. You will also find several links to image collections from around the world devoted to many subject areas in addition to art. If you have any questions concerning the discovery or use of images, feel free to contact me.
Image Collections - A Sampling
This list represents a few highlights from the more extensive group of links to be found on the "Finding Images on the Web" tab and grouped loosely by subject.
- JSTOR Open Collections Filter on Open Collections.
- Artsy "Artsy’s mission is to make all the world’s art accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. We are an online platform for discovering, learning about, and collecting art...Artsy provides one of the largest collections of contemporary art available online."
- NGA (U.S.) Images - High Resolution Downloads More than 25,000 open access digital images up to 3000 pixels each are available free of charge for download and use. NGA Images is designed to facilitate learning, enrichment, enjoyment, and exploration.
- Getty Research Institut/J. Paul Getty Museum - Open Content Program Images from the museum and research institute collections available for any use by anyone.
- Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum "This website represents Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s diverse collection, spanning thirty centuries of historic and contemporary design, including the world's coolest office, a large snail shell, snakes, a dragon and four bearded men, a cone propped up on a bench, a pair of colorful hands, a mysterious tv and a perpetual calendar."
- Internet Archive Book ImagesOver 2.6 million copyright free images.
- British Pathé YouTube channel Footage of major events in Britain and around the world from 1896-1976.
- Tate Audio Arts archive"Explore and listen to the innovative audio cassette-magazine Audio Arts, established by Bill Furlong in 1972"
- French Revolution Digital Archive"The French Revolution Digital Archive (FRDA) is a multi-year collaboration of the Stanford University Libraries and the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) to produce a digital version of the key research sources of the French Revolution and make them available to the international scholarly community. The archive is based around two main resources, the Archives parlementaires and a vast corpus of images first brought together in 1989 and known as the Images de la Revolution française."
- Wellcome Images Wellcome Images is one of the world's richest and most unique collections, with themes ranging from medical and social history to contemporary healthcare and biomedical science.
- Metropolitan Museum of Art - Full-text Catalogues NOTE: Not all of the texts will have all images due to copyright restrictions.
- Italian Renaissance Learning Resources "Researchers and students can explore thematic essays, more than 340 images, 300 glossary items and 42 primary source texts. An invaluable tool for use in the classroom, educators can integrate printable activity guides and discussion questions related to each unit into their course work."
- Nicholas V. Artamonoff Collection - Archaeological Sites in TurkeyThe Nicholas V. Artamonoff Collection includes 542 photographs taken in Istanbul and five archaeological sites in Western Turkey (Ephesus, Hierapolis, Laodicea on the Lycus, Pergamum, Priene) from 1935 to 1945.
- Rijksmuseum Collection The Rijksmuseum is offering its entire collection free to the public to use, to manipulate, and to create new work.
- Rembrandt DatabaseThe Rembrandt Database is an English website with research material, texts, images, and other data on paintings by Rembrandt and those attributed to him.
- National Portrait Gallery, London, UK The UK National Portrait Gallery now provides free image downloads for academic and non-commercial use. See their website for more information.
- Shorpy.com"The 100-Year-Old Photo Blog. Shorpy.com/Hisotryin HD is a vintage photo blog featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1950s. The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago." Most images are from the Library of Congress collections.
- Science Photo Library"Science Photo Library (SPL) provides creative professionals with striking specialist imagery, unrivalled in quality, accuracy and depth of information. We have more than 350,000 images and 20,000 clips to choose from, with hundreds of new submissions uploaded to the website each week."
- New York City Department of Records"Welcome to the New York City Municipal Archives Online Gallery of over 870,000 images. Selected from the world-class historical collections of the Archives, most of these unique photographs, maps, motion picture and audio recordings are being made accessible for the first time."
- Gothic Past: Gothic Architecture and Sculpture in IrelandGothic Past is an open-access resource for the study of medieval Irish architecture and sculpture. It is part of a research project in the Department of History of Art and Architecture, Trinity College Dublin and is funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS)
- Public Domain Review "The Public Domain Review aspires to become a bounteous gateway into the whopping plenitude that is the public domain, helping our readers to explore this rich terrain by surfacing unusual and obscure works, and offering fresh reflections and unfamiliar angles on material which is more well known."
- Real Virtual: Representing Architectural Time and Space (Columbia University)"This History of Architecture Web site is designed to support undergraduate education, from introductory art and architectural history surveys to advanced courses on specific art historical periods and themes."
- Jame J. Ross Archive of African Images, 1590-1920RAAI contains approximately 5,000 illustrations of African art published before 1921.
- National Archives: Environmental Studies: Documerica by TopicFor the Documerica Project (1971-1977), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) hired freelance photographers to capture images relating to environmental problems, EPA activities, and everyday life in the 1970s. The National Archives digitized part of the series "Documerica" (Local ID 412-DA). More than 15,000 of these images are available in the National Archives Catalog.
- CineFiles from UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film ArchiveCineFiles contains scanned images of reviews,press kits, festival and showcase program notes, newspaper articles, and other documents form the PFA Library's extensive collection cover world cinema, past and present.
- Free Publishable Images from The British MuseumScholars are now able to use images free of charge for use in teaching, academic study and research. Follow this link to see full terms and conditions and how to register with the British Museum.
- Free High Resolution Images from the Victoria and Albert MuseumThe Victoria and Albert Museum in London is allowing scholars and individuals to use high resolution images free of charge for academic/scholarly publications, study and research and in student theses. See the link for full terms and conditions of use.
- Final Images of Classical sculptures from the Berlin State Museums in ARTstorThe Prussian Cultural Properties Foundation (Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz) and ARTstor have collaborated to digitize key works of Classical sculpture from the Berlin State Museums (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin)
- Art and Architecture from Pilgrimage Routes to Santiago de Compostela in ARTstor900 images of art and architecture along the pilgrimage routes to Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain. Photographs by William Keighley.
- Art, Architecture, and Culture in Southeast Asia and Morocco in ARTstorARTstor has collaborated with Barbara Anello to make available 750 images of the architecture, arts, and culture of Southeast Asia and Morocco in the Digital Library. Anello, a photographer and art historian, has photographed the domestic architecture of rural areas and ethnic minorities in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Indonesia, documenting how traditional building forms have been preserved or lost over time.
- Additional Plans of Ancient and Medieval Buildings and Archaeological Sites from Bryn MawrThis third release for the Plans of Ancient and Medieval Buildings and Archaeological Sites (Bryn Mawr College) collection includes site plans of Ancient and Classical sites in the Near East and Europe, primarily Greece, Italy, and Turkey, from the 10th century BCE through the 6th century CE.
- British Museum Collection DatabaseSearch almost two million objects in the British Museum collections. Now available are the Pacific photograph collections in raw form.
- Digital New Zealand DigitalNZ is the search site for all things New Zealand. We connect you to reliable digital collections from our content partners, including: libraries museums galleries government departments the media community groups, and others. On DigitalNZ you can discover more than 30 million digital items from more than 200 organisations on any topic, all for free. You'll find: videos newspapers maps photographs audio artworks news reports
- Cook's Voyages to the South Seas image in ARTstorTo browse these new images, go to the ARTstor Digital Library, browse by collection, and click on "Cook's Voyages to the South Seas (Natural History Museum, London)." Or, to view the images associated with each of Cook's voyages, you may search the keywords: endeavour botanical OR cook forster OR cook ellis
- Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection in ARTstorTo view the Brooklyn Museum Costumes (The Metropolitan Museum of Art) collection: go to the ARTstor Digital Library, browse by collection, and click "The Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art." Or search the keywords: brooklyn costume
- 180,000+ Pubic Domain Images at New York Public LibraryThe link to the full Digitial Collections archive is located on the "Finding Images on the Web" tab under "General Images"
Citing Images
The following link takes you to a site with great examples of how to cite images using Chicago Manual of style in your papers. You can also consult the Chicago Manual in sections 12.31 - 12.51 for directions on how to write captions and credit lines.
- Citing Images - GeneralThis site has a great set of example of how to cite images in your papers.
- Citing ARTstor ImagesThis page will give you instructions on how to save and export citations for ARTstor images you use.
Requesting Images
Copy images from books and periodicals can be requested via the form linked below. Turn around time is generally two weeks, but it may be shorter. Images will be fully catalogued and delivered via a group in the ARTstor environment. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask.
