5. Image Databases
The following databases represent a sampling of significant collections of digital images. The availability of digital images is rapidly increasing with new sources appearing regularly. Please see the Reference Librarian if you would like assistance with searching for digital images.
American Memory: Library of Congress
American Memory provides free access to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience. 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. Images may be retrieved and downloaded by keyword searching.
Archives of American Art: Smithsonian Institution
Contains more than 6,000 photographs of artists and art world figures, letters, sketches and sketchbooks, diaries, printed materials, ephemera, and other documents from the Archives' collections have been digitized, with more being added on a regular basis. Use keyword searching or browse by artist, topic and other categories.
American Landscape and Architectural Design, 1850-1920
This collection of approximately 2,800 lantern slides represents an historical view of American buildings and landscapes built during the period 1850-1920. It represents the work of Harvard faculty, such as Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., Bremer W. Pond, and James Sturgis Pray, as well as that of prominent landscape architects throughout the country. The collection offers views of cities, specific buildings, parks, estates and gardens, including a complete history of Boston's Park System. In addition to photographs, views of locations around the country include plans, maps, and models. Hundreds of private estates from all over the United States are represented in the collection through contemporary views of their houses and gardens (including features such as formal gardens, terraces, and arbors).
Art Resource
Art Resource is a fully searchable collection of over 250,000 fine art reference images and offers a very good representation of historical and contemporary works. Art Resource has assigned subject terms to its images thus making it possible to search images thematically. Publication and projection quality images are available from Art Resource for a fee.
ARTstor
ARTstor is a not-for-profit organization funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation whose purpose is to develop a database of digital images and accompanying scholarly information for use in art history and other humanistic fields of learning, including the related social sciences. As part of its ongoing effort to become a community resource, ARTstor is developing a digital library that will offer coherent collections of art images and descriptive information as well as the software tools to enable active use of the collections. The ARTstor Library presently contains over 500,000 images covering fine art, architecture, photography, and archeology. In addition, 120,000 images from the Fine Arts Library Visual Resources Collection and 20,000 images from the Visual Collections of the Frances Loeb Library are now available in the ARTstor Library. ARTstor's software tools support a wide range of pedagogical and research uses including: viewing and analyzing images through features such as zooming and panning, saving groups of images online for personal or shared uses, and creating and delivering presentations both online and offline using ARTstor's free Offline Viewer (OLV).
Bridgeman Art Library
Bridgeman Art Library offers keyword searching of its collection of over 100,000 art reference images from major international museums, galleries and auction houses. Grove’s dictionary entry links offer users access to over 40,000 images from hundreds of international museum and gallery Web sites. Publication and projection quality images are available from Bridgeman Art Library for a fee.
CAMIO Library
The CAMIO Library (formerly AMICO) contains digital images and detailed descriptions for over 115,000 works of art from major museums in the United States and Canada. Media include photographs, prints, sculpture, paintings, decorative arts, drawings,architecture, and textiles. Simple or advanced modes allow searching by artist, title of work, date, medium, subject, collection, and location. The standard for image resolution is 1024 x 768 pixels. Images may be printed or exported for educational purposes.
Digital Collections at Harvard University
A selection of searchable digital image collections created from unique Harvard Library holdings. Images represent a broad range of disciplines and cultural history worldwide.
Early American Imprints, Series I (1639-1800)
This resource is based on the microform collection of books, pamphlets and broadsides issued in America from 1639 to 1800, recorded in Charles Evans' American Bibliography and Roger P. Bristol's Supplement to Charles Evans' American Bibliography, which includes material on virtually every aspect of life in 17th- and 18th-century America. The database provides for simple and advanced searching, and for browsing by a variety of subject terms, genre, author, and printer/publisher. Searchable, OCR-generated ASCII text is associated with each page image.
Early American Newspapers (1690-1876)
Searchable, full-text database of early American newspapers, based on collection published in microform by Readex. The majority were published between 1690 and 1820, although issues of newspapers that continued publication beyond these dates are included, through 1876. Searchable, OCR-generated ASCII text is associated with each page image.
Great Buildings Collection
This collection documents architecture around the world and across history documents more than a thousand buildings and hundreds of leading architects and includes 3D models, photographic images and architectural drawings, commentaries, bibliographies, web links, and more, for famous designers and structures. GreatBuildings.com is also cross-linked with ArchitectureWeek, the leading architecture magazine online, and Archiplanet, the community-created all-buildings collection.
Grove Online
Grove Online provides searching and links to digital images of art works from over 40,000 museums, galleries, and art collections around the world.
Harvard University Art Museums: Collections Online
Collections Online provides access to basic information about every object on exhibition in HUAM galleries as well as approximately 81,000 works of art in HUAM collections. Digital images are included for some objects. Collections Online is a research discovery tool and does not present all of the documentation held by the Harvard University Art Museums on its collections.
New York Public Library: NYPL Digital
Contains over 550,000 images from a wide variety of primary sources including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints, photographs, illustrated books, and printed ephemera. Images may be copied or downloaded.
VIA: Visual Information Access
VIA (Visual Information Access) is Harvard's online union catalog documenting the arts, material culture, and social history. VIA contains descriptive records and images representing paintings, sculpture, photography, drawings, prints, architecture, decorative arts, trade cards, rubbings, theater designs, maps and plans. Participating repositories include archives, museums, libraries, and other collections throughout Harvard University. New material is added to VIA daily. High resolution down-loadable images are available.
Visual Arts Data Service
An expanding collections of images gathered to support research, learning and teaching, by providing visual arts digital resources through robust systems for Internet access and long term preservation; and to encourage, support and facilitate engagement with visual arts digital resources, through collaborative and creative endeavour. This UK project contains more than 25 collections covering a broad ranges of art and architecture with over 100,000 images.
World Images
WorldImages provides access to the California State University IMAGE Project. It contains over 60,000 images which may be freely used for non-profit educational purposes. The images can be located using multiple search indexes and are organized into some 600 subject grouping portfolios.
