* Art & Art History: Home

The Library of Congress offers access to a portion of its photography collection and other historical document collections

Digital collections that feature areas of special collections from the Research Library are available online. Digital collections may complement a Research Institute exhibition or focus on a particular artist, subject, collection, or group of collections. In addition to images and other media, they may include contextual and historical information and links to related resources both inside and outside the Getty.

Getty Images, the world's largest photo agency, has made up to 35 million photos free to use, in an effort to combat piracy, through their "embed" tool. Images can also be shared on social media sites Twitter and Tumblr.

Allows you to limit your search by size, color, aspect ratio, usage rights and more.

Explore museums from around the world, discover and view hundreds of artworks at incredible zoom levels, and even create and share your own collection of masterpieces.

flickr has partnered with the Internet Archive to display all images from their books scanned in separate image searches. The flickr site allows you to then look at all the images in that one book (where the one image was found) or read the text of that book.

An online photo gallery, hosted by Google, that features millions of images from Life magazine's archives.

Metropolitan Museum of Art's Open Access Policty for images in the collection

Thousands of historic media files for your creative projects, completely free.

Database includes 22,000 historical and contemporary images from Rochester and Monroe County. Images were chosen from the collections of the Central Library of Rochester and Monroe County Local History Division, the City of Rochester Municipal Archives and City Hall Photo Lab, the Rochester Museum & Science Center, the Town of Brighton Historian's Office, the Town of Perinton Historian's Office, the Village of East Rochester Historian's Office and the Village of Hilton Historian's Office.

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.

Thousands of years of visual culture made free through Wellcome Images; over 100,000 high resolution images including manuscripts, paintings, etchings, early photography and advertisements are being released under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license.

Archnet is focused on architecture, urbanism, environmental and landscape design, visual culture, and conservation issues related to the Muslim world. Archnet’s mission is to provide ready access to unique visual and textual material to facilitate teaching, scholarship, and professional work of high quality. Officially launched in 2002 as a partnership between the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Archnet has since evolved into the largest open, online architectural library with a focus on Muslim cultures.

Artsy is an online platform for discovering, learning about, and collecting art. The growing collection comprises 140,000+ artworks by 25,000+ artists from leading art fairs, galleries, museums, and art institutions. Artsy provides one of the largest collections of contemporary art available online.

The Getty Research Portal™ is a free online search platform providing worldwide access to an extensive collection of digitized art history texts from a range of institutions. This multilingual and multicultural union catalog affords art historians and other researchers the ability to search and download complete digital copies of publications devoted to art, architecture, material culture, and related fields.

From women's suffrage to some surprising examples of campaign swag, explore the fascinating evolution of American democracy through images and original documents.

Search the full text of millions of books and download public domain titles.

A timeline of art history from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Online database of selected works in the Memorial Art Gallery collection.

The Perseus Project is an evolving digital library of resources for the study of the ancient world and beyon

The VC mission is to use new technology and hitherto inaccessible visual materials to reconstruct the past as people of the time visualized the world (or imagined it to be).

Expand the search options under "Articles, Books & More" and select "Videos & More" to search for DVDs, streaming video and video games.

Streaming video on Dance

Master Academic Video Collection - Streaming
Individually selected titles from more than 800 international producers to bring a wide variety of the most relevant videos to suit the unique instructional needs of every subject.

There are over 2500 full-length avant-garde films and videos, both streaming and downloadable, including the videos of Vito Acconci and the filmic oeuvre of Jack Smith, You can also find several biographies and interviews with authors such as Jorge Luis Borges, J. G. Ballard, Allen Ginsberg, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline. And there are a number of films about avant-garde music, most notably Robert Ashley’s epic 14-hour Music with Roots in the Aether, a series of composer portraits made in the mid-70s featuring artists such as Pauline Oliveros, Philip Glass, and Alvin Lucier. A dozen of the rarely screened films by Mauricio Kagel can be viewed as can Her Noise, a documentary about women and experimental music from 2005. There are also hours of performance documentation, notably the entire Cinema of Transgression series with films by Beth B and Richard Kern, a lecture by Chris Burden, a bootleg version of Robert Smithson’s HOTEL PALENQUE, (1969) and an astonishing 21-minute clip of Abbie Hoffman making gefilte fish on Christmas Eve of 1973.

Other portions of the site include a vast repository of papers about audio, performance, conceptual art, and poetry. There are large sections of artists simply placed together under categories of Historical and Contemporary.

Published in 2012. This document covers all areas of copyright and fair use in academic libraries, including the use of illustrations in dissertations and theses.

Created by the College Art Association and published in February 2015

From the Center for Social Media, American University.

Created with the support of the American Library Association's Office for Information Technology. Answers some questions about a specific work and the tool will give you information regarding its copyright status.