Additions to this page (March 2007):

• National Palace Museum of Taipei, available through CDL
• Calisphere
• Los Angeles Public Library Photo Collection
• David Mattison's "Looking for Good Art"
• Foto Marburg's Bildarchiv der Kunst und Architektur

UCSC-licensed digital image collections

ARTstor is a collection of over 550,000 images (as of October 2007), available to subscribers in low-resolution format (for export), and high-resolution format (for on-line presentations or to download into ARTstor's own Offline Image Viewer). ARTstor contains a general collection ("The Image Gallery") and many specialized collections.

These handouts give a brief overview of ARTstor with instructions for registering and using the collection:

Faculty User Handout (4 pages)
Student User Handout (2 pages)

News: The latest ARTstor Newsletter, Volume Eight (February 2007), is available at the website and contains the following articles:

• New collaborations announced, increasing ARTstor's holdings in contemporary art and Latin American art and architecture.
• Participant viewpoints: Manhattanville College, Purchase, New York.
• New content: Scala Archives, Native American Ledger Drawings, Contemporary Art and Architecture, Asian Art and Architecture, Medieval French Architecture, and Colonial American Architecture.
• How ARTstor learns about users: results from a user survey conducted by ARTstor.

More recent announcements about collections and software updates can be be found on the Announcements page.

The Associated Press AccuNet Multimedia Archive contains "over two million photographs dating back to 1826, more than one million audio sound bytes dating from the 1920’s, two million Associated Press news stories from 1997, and a professionally produced collection of more than 45,000 maps, graphs, charts, logos, flags, illustrations, etc." It is updated with more than 3,000 photos a day.

The California Digital Library (CDL) has licensed several digital image collections (comprising more than 250,000 images) for UC-affiliates, and is making these collections available through Luna Insight software. You may access the collections if you have a UCSC campus internet connection, or have access to the campus proxy server.

The Insight software is available either as a downloadable Java client, or through a browser. (Note: Browser Insight does not work in Safari.) You can download the Java client at http://www.cdlib.org/hlp/directory/insight.html.

CDL-provided content includes:

• the Library of UC Images / Saskia collection, with almost 30,000 images emphasizing core works required for teaching the history of Western Art;
• SPIRO, the image database of the slide library of UC Berkeley's School of Architecture, with over 65,000 images; and
• the MOAC (Museums and the Online Archive of California) collection, with more than 77,193 images from eleven California museums, UC and non-UC.
• The National Palace Museum of Taipei collection of 5,005 breathtaking images of Chinese ceramics, paintings, bronzes, jewelry, costumes, and books.

Grove Art Online

Oxford's "Grove Art Online" now presents more than 3,000 images in the articles, and links to the online collections of Art Resource (90,000 images), Bridgeman Art Library (over 100,000), and various museums and galleries (over 40,000). Grove Art Online comprises the full text of The Dictionary of Art, edited by Jane Turner (1996, 34 vols) and The Oxford Companion to Western Art, edited by Hugh Brigstocke (2001).

Pictures of Record

The UCSC Library has licensed the digital image collection of Pictures of Record. The collection contains almost 6,000 images, chiefly of archeological and anthropological interest. To access the image database, search for "Pictures of Record" in the CruzCat library catalog and mouse-click on the link, "Access restrictions may apply". Note: we recommend that you browse the sets before you try searching by keyword.

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Consortial digital image collections
allowing public access, under fair-use guidelines
(see sites for copyright policies)

The Library of Congress' American Memory site offers over 9 million digital items (documents, photographs, maps, films, and audio recordings) from more than 100 collections. Copyright restrictions prevent reproduction of some images, but most of them may be used for educational purposes.

• List of the online map collections. Maps are in .jpg format or in .sid (MrSID by LizardTech) format, viewable through a free, downloadable viewer.
• List of the online photo and print collections. Almost all photos are in medium-resolution .gif or .jpg format, but some collections offer high-resolution TIFF images, for which a special (but free and downloadable) viewer is necessary.
• See also the separate catalog of the Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs Division, which contains all the Division's submissions to American Memory, as well as more images, many in high resolution format.

The libraries of the University of California present Calisphere, a selection of digitized primary sources designed to support K-12 instruction. "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." Patrons can search by keyword or find sets of primary sources using search terms selected from the California Content Standards.

CSU WorldImages Kiosk

California State University's World Art Kiosk. Database includes over 60,000 images. Searchable by nationality, time period, art form, style, city/site, object/building type. There are also 690 "portfolios" of pre-selected images on topics such as "Asia", "Africa", "Science, Technology and Industry", and "History, Religion and Cultural Interaction". Newest additions include 1500 images of art, architecture, and culture in Ethiopia and Eritrea. Many of the images are "zoomable" with a free Flash player. Copyright: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License.

Digital Imaging Project

Professor Mary Ann Sullivan (emerita, Bluffton University) is developing a website with "art historical images of sculpture and architecture from pre-historic to post-modern." The collection numbers more than 13,000 images, including many showing Olmec and Mayan sites in Mexico.

SlideCat, the on-line catalog of the UCSC Library's Visual Resource Collection, now includes thumbnail images accessible to everyone and full-screen low-resolution images for UCSC-affiliates. The catalog currently contains over 6,000 images, in addition to more than 231,000 text records for UCSC's 35mm slide collection.

The UK's Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS), a consortial project with digital image collections in archaeology, history, the visual and performing arts, and literature/languages/linguistics. The Visual Arts section represents 30 collections, accessible through simple or advanced searches, including

• The Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland (over 50,000 images! Includes images from the "Church Plans Online" project. Also available directly at the CRSBI website)
• African and Asian Visual Artists Archive (now the Diversity Art Forum - 1,946 images of contemporary art)
• Design magazine: 1965-1974, from the London College of Communication (over 2500 images)
• Russian Visual Arts: Art Criticism in Context, 1814-1909, from Sheffield University
• South Asian Diaspora Literature and Arts Archive
• Women's Library: Suffrage Banners Collection, from London Guildhall University

The Musée du Louvre website offers access to 4 databases: Atlas (35,000 records for works on display in the Louvre), the Prints and Drawings digital database (140,000 works on paper, by some 4,500 artists), and the Joconde database (in French), representing the collections of over 60 French museums (around 348,000 records with over 179,500 images!). New: the La Fayette Database of American Art. "This bilingual online catalogue presents more than 1,700 works produced by United States artists that entered the national collections of France before 1940."

The Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, a part of the Philipps-Universität Marburg, is a huge archive of images of European art and architecture. The digital image database, "Bildindex der Kunst und Architektur", contains almost 2 million images. Keyword searching, advanced searching by numerous fields (including artist, patron, medium, site, theme, subject, ICONCLASS, etc.), and alphabetical browsing of places, artists, themes, and portraits. In German.

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A Sampling of Individual Library and Museum
Image Databases (there are hundreds more)
Before copying digital images from a site, please read the site's copyright policy.

	The New York Public Library's Picture Collection Online continues to grow, now numbering more than 550,000 images "digitized from primary sources and printed rarities in the collections of The New York Public Library, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints and photographs, illustrated books, printed ephemera, and more." Database includes thumbnails and larger images, and is searchable by several fields, including creator, title, and subject. Site also has personal gallery feature.
	The Los Angeles Public Library Photo Collection publishes a database containing more than 60,000 images of Los Angeles, Southern California life and California history. Many of the photos pre-date World War II.
The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco	The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (De Young Museum and Legion of Honor) present the "Thinker" database, with over 82,000 images. The images are "zoomable", and the database also has a Virtual Gallery feature, in which patrons may assemble and share a group of images.
	Los Angeles County Museum of Art's LACMA Collections Online contains images of nearly 70,000 works of art, in thumbnail and larger image format.
The Digital Scriptorium	The Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library of Duke University publishes The Digital Scriptorium. It includes several online image collections: Emergence of Advertising in America, 1850-1920 (over 9,000 items, 1850-1920), Ad*Access (7,000 advertisements from 1911 to 1955), William Gale Gedney Photographs and Writings (over 4900 images from the 1950s to 1980s), Urban Landscape (1000 images), and the Duke Papyrus Archive (over 1300 items).
	The Smithsonian's Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery have an online image database with more than 6,000 images of more than 1000 items from their collections. The collection includes works from East Asia, Southeast Asia, the ancient Near East, the Islamic world, as well as many works by James McNeill Whistler and his followers.
	The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., has an online searchable catalog of its collection, which includes digital images for more than 6,000 items, along with more than 11,800 detail views.
	The British Museum's database contains images of about 5,000 objects, with thumbnails and larger images.
	Picture Australia is a cross-collection search engine for 28 Australian libraries, archives, museums, galleries, and foundations. Subject matter is all things Australian, from the 19th century to the present. In April 2004 the project celebrated the inclusion of its one millionth image.
	UCSC Library, Branson DeCou Archive. Medium-resolution digital images of 1,475 hand-tinted lantern slides of Italy. DeCou used the lantern slides for travel lectures in the 1920s and 1930s. Collection browseable by city.

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Clearinghouse Lists of Image Database Sites

David Mattison, Access Archivist, British Columbia Archives, Royal BC Museum Corporation, published an outstanding article in 2004, "Looking for Good Art", which includes many, many annotated links to image databases. The comprehensive survey has three parts: Part 1: Web Resources and Image Databases, Part 2: Image Retrieval, Part 3: Glorious National Collections.

For on-line images of works by individual artists, try the Artcyclopedia. The site includes access links to 180,000 works of art by over 8,500 artists.

ARLIS/NA (Art Libraries Society of North America) has a clearinghouse page with links to its members' online image databases.

The UK's Technical Advisory Service for Images (TASI) group maintains a searchable database of annotated records and links to online image collections. See Image Sites. Notable collections include Dorling Kindersley Images ("3.5 million images, 70 thousand artworks, 180 talented photographers"); a complete on-line edition of the St. Alban's Psalter, from the University of Aberdeen; and the Art and Architecture web site, with more than 40,000 images, from the Courtauld Institute of Art.

The International Council of Museums, headquartered in Paris, publishes an on-line directory of museum webpages; however, you must visit each museum's website to see whether it offers an image database.

 

Copyright Issues, Using Images, Managing Personal Image Collections

UC Irvine's Visual Resource Collection presents "Finding and Using Images", with many links to "Search Engines and Directories," "Open Access Web Sites," "Imaging in Academia," "Licensed by UC Libraries," "Commercial Image Sources," "Image Management," "Fair Use Web Sites," "Using Images," "UC Specific Resources," and "Moving Image Resources."

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Finally, as a "last chance" resource try Google's Image Search, the flickr photo-sharing service offered by Yahoo, or Wikimedia Commons, with over 1 million media files (including images and sound files). The images retrieved vary widely in quality, but if all you need is a quick ID or a thumbnail, you might find it here.