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Digital Image Resources

for teaching and research at UCSC

Palio race, Siena

Il Palio, ca. 1920-30
Siena, Italy
Branson DeCou Archive
UCSC Visual Resource Collection


UCSC-licensed digital image collections

ARTstor is a collection of almost one million images (as of September 2008), available to subscribers in medium-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.

"ARTstor in 3 Minutes" instructional videos are available in ARTstor, on YouTube and on TeacherTube. Search for "artstor" in TeacherTube or follow the YouTube links below:


The ARTstor blog, www.artstor.org/blog, contains the full text of all current and archived announcements. Recent articles discuss additions to ARTstor and new help resources for ARTstor users:

newNew in ARTstor! UC Shared Collections!

Visual resources curators at several UC campuses are working to make digital images available across all the UC campuses. As of September 2008, ARTstor users at UC Santa Cruz can access not only the UCSC Instructional Collection and the History of Costume set, but also



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) Insight Collections: more than 30,000 images are available in these collections offered exclusively to Insight clients.

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.

Collections include:


Oxford Art Online (formerly Grove Art Online)
Oxford Art Online combines the contents of four resources: Grove Art Online, The Oxford Companion to Western Art, the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, and the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms. It now includes more than 5,000 images in the articles, and links to the online collections of ARTstor, Art Resource (90,000 images), Bridgeman Art Library (over 100,000 images), and various museums and galleries (over 40,000 images).

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

American Memory
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.


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.


Courtauld Art and Architecture
The Art and Architecture web site contains over 40,000 images and half a million links. The images are mostly drawn from the holdings of the Courtauld Institute's Art Gallery, and its Conway Library, a photo library of more than a million images. "The art on record ranges from Classical Antiquity to the most contemporary manifestations, now including a section on photographic and video arts and installations." Registered users can save images into a personal gallery, and order prints of their favorite images. "Images acquired via the Art and Architecture web site are for non-commercial private or educational use only."

CSU WorldImages Kiosk
California State University's World Art Kiosk. Database includes over 65,000 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.

VADS
The UK's VADS (Visual Arts Data Service) is a consortial project with digital image collections in archaeology, history, the visual and performing arts, and literature/languages/linguistics. Collections include:

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!). Newest: 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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Individual Library and Museum Image Databases
Before copying digital images from a site, please read the site's copyright policy.

Museums with large and varied online collections
  • Boston: The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has an online searchable catalog of over 330,000 objects in its collections. Most of the records include one or more images.

  • Cleveland: The Cleveland Museum of Art's online database contains records for more than 40,000 items, of which more than half include images.

  • Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art's LACMA Collections Online contains images of nearly 70,000 works of art

  • New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art offers views of 6,500 objects online. This includes the entire Department of European Paintings and the entire Department of American Paintings and Sculpture.

  • San Franscisco: The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (De Young Museum and Legion of Honor): the "Thinker" database contains over 82,000 images.

  • Washington, D.C.: The National Gallery of Art has an online searchable catalog of its collection, which includes digital images for more than 6,000 items.

  • Washington, D.C.: The Smithsonian American Art Museum's online catalog contains records for 41,000 objects, with images of more than 20,000 of them.

  • Ottawa: The National Gallery of Canada publishes CyberMuse, which contains over 10,000 images of works in the collection.

  • London: The British Museum's database contains images of about 5,000 objects, with thumbnails and larger images.

  • London: The National Portrait Gallery publishes an online database with 102,296 records, 53,316 of which are illustrated.

  • Cambridge: The online catalog of the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, contains almost 145,000 object records and 114,042 images.

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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.

 

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Commercial Image Collections

These sites include large numbers of digital images, of very high quality. Searching is free, and some vendors may offer discounted pricing for educational purposes.

Time and Life Pictures
Time and Life Pictures, sponsored by Getty Images: over 425,000 images of the finest in photojournalism, "documenting past and present political and cultural events, as well as celebrities and the American experience."
Corbis
Corbis: a huge collection, over 100 million images, including the Bettmann Archive of historical imagery. The royalty-free images are less expensive.
Scholars Resource
Scholars Resource: serving mainly art history and related disciplines, "representing more than 200 museums around the world and totaling more than 115,900 images spanning nearly every period in art history."

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.

Contact the Visual Resource Collection. Page updated 26 September 2008.

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