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GENERAL IMAGE RESOURCES: TEACHING & RESEARCH

Art and Art History Visual Resources Digital Image Collection
University of Colorado Digital Library (CU-DL)
ARTstor
Directories, Guides, and Search Engines
Selected Digital Image Collections and Related Content
Commercial Image Providers
Search Strategies

One must freqently search in more than one source for images needed for a particular Art and Art History course, class presentation, or research project. While the Art and Art History Visual Resources Digital Image Collection and the collections comprising the University of Colorado Digital Library (CU-DL) continue to grow, there will always be important image resources elsewhere. Current Department of Art and Art History faculty members and students may use the VRC scanning stations to create digital images from prints or slides. The following sections contain information about online image resources in the CU-DL and resources administered outside the University of Colorado. It is important to understand the laws governing copyright and exemptions to the exclusive rights of copyright holders. Images posted on the Internet are protected by copyright laws--it is imperative to read the Terms of Use for any web site before downloading images, even for educational purposes.

Art and Art History Visual Resources Digital Image Collection
The Art and Art History Visual Resources Digital Image Collection is the new teaching and research image collection of the Department of Art & Art History, University of Colorado at Boulder. It comprises increasing numbers of images depicting historical and contemporary art, architecture, and other visual and material culture from around the world. Please see our web page for more information about this collection. For copyright reasons, access is limited to current faculty, staff, and students at the University of Colorado and affiliated Auraria institutions on the Downtown Denver campus.

University of Colorado Digital Library (CU-DL)
The Art and Art History Visual Resources Collection is a founding member of the University of Colorado's Digital Image Collaborative, an image buying and sharing consortium. The other members are the Auraria Visual Resources Collection (Downtown Denver campus) and the College of Architecture and Planning's Visual Resource Center (Boulder and Downtown Denver campuses). These collections in turn are part of the University of Colorado Digital Library (CU-DL), a CU system-wide collaboration with the Auraria Higher Education Center, which includes digital collections from many local departments, colleges, libraries, and other institutions from around the world. IMPORTANT: Faculty members from the CU-Boulder campus who wish to export and use images from the CU-DL will want to use a Java client rather than the browser version currently available on the CU-DL web site. Please see our VRC DIGITAL IMAGE COLLECTION page for more information.

ARTstor
ARTstor is the largest image resource at the University of Colorado for those in the arts and humanities. It is a digital library of images to which all CU libraries subscribe (access is restricted to the CU community). The images, associated descriptive information, and software tools are intended to enhance teaching, learning, and scholarship in a broad range of disciplines.  ARTstor currently contains approximately 700,000 images of visual and material culture from around the world and throughout history. While its holdings in twentieth century and contemporary art are growing quickly and continuously, users may need to supplement ARTstor's content with other images. Although ARTstor has been designed to have a simple, intuitive interface, new users may find it helpful to review the Help documents in ARTstor to become familiar with the application’s functionality.

To access ARTstor, please go to http://www.artstor.org/.  From that page, click on the orange "Go" button in the upper right to enter the Welcome Page of the ARTstor Digital Library.  Anyone accessing ARTstor from an on-campus computer will be granted access automatically by IP authentication.  To access ARTstor from an off-campus computer, you must first access ARTstor from a computer on campus and register.  This will initiate a 120-day Remote Access Grace Period, during which you will be able to log on remotely using your e-mail address and the password you created.  Each time you log on to ARTstor from a computer on campus, the 120-day grace period is reinitiated.  You may also access ARTstor remotely without re-authenticating from a campus IP address by using Virtual Private Network (VPN) software.  VPN software allows you to access resources that are limited to users at the University of Colorado (e.g., ARTstor), by making your computer appear to be accessing the Internet via the Boulder network, rather than through an off campus ISP.  See http://www.colorado.edu/its/vpn/ for information on downloading and installing the VPN software, available to the CU-Boulder community free of charge.

While ARTstor has recently made approximately 95% of its images available for downloading at 1024 pixels on the long side, it is important to know that for classroom presentations of ARTstor's high-resolution images with the quality required to zoom and create details, you will need to download the Offline Image Viewer (OIV) software from the ARTstor web site after registering.  This presentation software, created and streamlined for image use, allows you to import your own digital images to combine with ARTstor's images. It is similar to PowerPoint but with some enhanced functionality designed for image presentations.

See the ARTstor Quickstart Guide for the CU-Boulder campus [PDF].

DIRECTORIES, GUIDES, & SEARCH ENGINES

• Art History Resources on the Web: Created by Professor Christopher Witcombe, Professor, Department of Art and Art History, Sweet Briar College, Virginia.


• Digital Images Collections Wiki: From Wellesley College. An extremely useful resource of Free- and Fair-Use digital image collections that are available for anyone to use for personal and educational purposes.


• Digital Image Resources: From the Visual Resources Library of Emory University's Art History Department, divided into useful subject areas.


• Finding Images Online: From the Technical Advisory Service for Images (TASI). TASI is a government-funded advisory service for higher education institutions in the UK. The site includes links to finding stock images, current events images, art images, historical images, scientific images, and maps.


• Flickr: Online photo management and sharing application. Users upload and tag (label) photos, which they may choose to share publicly and allow others to tag for better search results. When opened, images available for downloading feature an ALL SIZES button that will reveal download options.


• Google Advanced Image Search: Google's image search engine provides links to countless images on the Web, many of which are low quality with frequently extraneous search results. To narrow search results with higher quality images, use the Advanced Image Search and specify an image size of at least medium. Google has introduced Google Image Labeler, a new social tagging feature that invites users to label images for improved search results.


• Image Collections and Online Art: A section of Andrew Midkiff's comprehensive web site, The Mother of All Art History Link Pages.


• Library of Congress Global Gateway: A gateway to rich primary source materials relating to history and culture. The site offers more than 80,000 digital items.


• Looking for Good Art: In-depth guide in three parts: 1) Web Resources and Image Databases; 2) Image Retrieval; 3) Glorious National Collections.


• Museums: Directory of online museum collections around the world; another section of Andrew Midkiff's The Mother of All Art History Link Pages.


• Museum Collections Available Online: The UCB Libraries Art & Architecture Collection's list.


• Online Image Resources: Well organized directory from University of California, Santa Barbara's Department of the History of Art and Architecture.
  
  

SELECTED DIGITAL IMAGE COLLECTIONS & RELATED CONTENT

• Accunet/AP Multimedia Archive: The AccuNet/AP Multimedia Archive is an electronic library containing the Associated Press' current year's photo reports and a selection of photos from their 50 million image print and negative library. The Multimedia Archive also inlcudes AP graphics, text and audio. This resource provides access to over 700,000 photographs dating back to 1840 as well as audio and visual content from the AP archives (access is limited to the CU-Boulder community with a limit of one concurrent user).


• Art Images for College Teaching (AICT): Art Images for College Teaching (AICT) is a personal, non-profit project of its author, art historian and visual resources curator Allan T. Kohl. AICT is intended primarily to disseminate images of art and architectural works in the public domain on a free-access, free-use basis to all levels of the educational community, as well as to the public at large. The images displayed on this site have been photographed on location by the author, who consents to their use in any application that is both educational and non-commercial in nature.


• ArtServe: Contains around 450,000 images. Created by Michael Greenhalgh, Professor Emeritus of Art History at the Australian National University. Dedicated to visual material useful for teaching and learning Art History and adjacent areas. Artwork (but not publicly visitable architecture) from about the period of World War II onward is excluded for copyright reasons.


• The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.


• California Digital Library: The University of California System's consolidated digital collections.


• Digital Imaging Project: Created by Mary Ann Sullivan at Bluffton University. The growing archive currently contains over 14,000 images. They are freely available for personal or educational purposes.


• Grove Dictionary of Art: Authoritative reference resource on the history of art, Grove includes many illustrated articles (access is limited to the CU-Boulder community).


• Library of Congress: The American Memory Collections provide access to a diverse range of materials on American history and culture. The collections include images, video and audio recordings, and historical documents. The Library of Congress also collects materials on global culture and history, which are available through LC's Global Gateway. The American Memory and Global Gateway projects are excellent sources of information and multimedia content about American and international history and culture. The Library of Congress also provides a searchable database for accessing the holdings of its Prints and Photographs Division. Approximately one million digital images are available for searching and browsing.


• The Met's Timeline of Art History: From the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Provides short introductions to periods, cultures, and geographical areas in the history of world art illustrated with works from the Met’s permanent collection.


• The New York Public Library's Digital Gallery: Features over 480,000 digitized images of primary sources and other printed materials in their collection.  The Gallery includes manuscripts, maps, vintage posters, historical photographs, and much more.


• Smithsonian Institution: Multimedia presentations featuring works from their diverse collections of art, historical archives, and material culture holdings.  These presentations are organized by theme (20th century photography, Japanese internment, the challenges of invasive species, etc.) and include visual and audio materials as well as text.  Content is available on topics related to art and design, history and culture, and science and technology.


• Stoa Image Gallery: The Stoa Consortium for Electronic Publication exists primarily to serve classicists. Its image gallery contains user-created albums with many large, high quality images available for non-commercial purposes.


• University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service: Diverse range of collections from the University of Michigan. While many collections are restricted, many others are available to the public.


• University of Washington Libraries Digital Collections: Particularly strong in materials related to the Pacific Northwest and Native Americans.


• Web Gallery of Art: A personal gallery with a searchable database of European painting and sculpture from the 12th to mid-19th centuries. Contains over 18,000 images. While most images are surrogates scanned from printed sources, many are of acceptable quality for classroom projection.


• WorldImages: Provides access to the California State University IMAGE Project. It contains over 60,000 images, is global in coverage and includes all areas of visual imagery. WorldImages is accessible anywhere and its images may be freely used for non-profit educational purposes.

COMMERCIAL IMAGE PROVIDERS
The Art and Art History VRC has secured site license agreements with the image vendors belonging to the Scholars Resource consortium. The VRC purchases digital images for teaching and research only, and cannot facilitate agreements with vendors for images use in publications.

The VRC purchases images upon request for Art and Art History faculty. To build wish lists of images, visit the Scholars Resource web site, and link to create an account under the Log In for Expanded Features section. On that page, enter your e-mail address and a password of your choice. The next page asks you if you are affiliated with an institution - after choosing yes, enter "Boulder" in the keyword search field. This will generate the correct account for our department: University of Colorado: UCB, UCDHSC, and UCCS Boulder, CO United States. Select the institution, and enter the account information on the next page. Click the create account button, and you are ready to start your wish lists.

Under Orders and Wishlists, link to Manage your Lists. This section can be found in future under the My Account link at the top of the page. In the Create New List section, enter the wish list title and any comments your wish to share. Please limit each list to no more than forty images (perhaps by theme or lecture). When saving your list, please select an option other than "Private List" so that the list will be visible to VRC staff. Upon finding an image of interest on the Scholars Resource site, open it by clicking on the image title, then simply click on the Add to List link underneath the thumbnail. Repeat for up to forty images per list. Note that when you create more than one list, new items are added to the first list as it appears on the Manage your Lists section. To add images to a previous group, simply drag the desired wish list to the top of the sequence of lists before adding images that list.

Please send an e-mail to Elaine Paul with the title of your wish list, or if you have any questions about this process.

Image Providers Directory: Source for locating vendors of slides and digital images. Some information is out of date.

Image vendors for the departmental collection:
Note that the vendors below typically license the rights to publish images, but this constitutes a separate contract to be established between the vendor and author or publisher. The Art and Art History VRC does not facilitate this process.

• Scholars Resource:
  • Archivision: The Archivision Digital Archive is a unique and growing collection of architectural images photographed by Scott Gilchrist, a professional photographer, architect and past VR curator. Each site's documentation is extensive. The archive is intended for in-depth research & analysis by students of architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, archaeology, art and art history.
  • The Bridgeman Art Library: The Bridgeman archive includes at present about 14,000 images from museums primarily from western European collections. Painting selections include French works from the Giraudon Archives, especially from the nineteenth century. Highlights of the archive include the Bayeux Tapestry, the Isenheim Altar, the Ghent Altarpiece, and a wide variety of illuminated manuscripts from the Bibliothèque Nationale and other repositories, as well as more unusual works such as the Aztec Codex Borbonicus.
  • Davis Art Images: The Davis archive offers a wide range of works from American museums. Well known paintings like Van Gogh's Starry Night at the Museum of Modern Art and the broad selection of Japanese block prints at the Brooklyn Museum of Art illustrate the wealth and breadth of the archive. The Cuzco School, Mughal painting, and historic photography as well as contemporary works are important components of the archive.
  • Hartill Art Associates: The Hartill archive spans a greater breadth of history than that of any other Scholars Resource vendor, ranging from the prehistoric caves of Altamira to the wealth of contemporary buildings of the 20th & 21st centuries. From ancient Egypt to the countries of Western Europe Alec Hartill's photography of architecture also includes sculpture, stained glass, mosaic, etc. and his images range from vernacular examples to grand architect-designed structures, from deceptively simple Romanesque churches to intricate French Gothic cathedrals.
  • Inter-American Institute: The archive of the Inter-American Institute, with photography by Dr. James B. Kiracofe, presently offers images from Spain and Mexico. Architectural examples from Spain include Roman bridges, theatres, and amphitheatres. Islamic examples include Seville's Alcazar and Granada's Alhambra as well as structures in Toledo, Merida, and Cordoba. From Mexico he offers extensive coverage of the Mayan sites of Chichen Itza, Labná, and Tulum, and the Zapotec site of Monte Alban. Spanish Colonial architecture in Mexico is well documented, particularly the churches and their distinctive Retablos.
  • Kenneth Garrett Collection--National Geographic: Scholars Resource is pleased to welcome a new vendor, Kenneth Garrett, with an initial group of images from Egypt and the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Included are sculpted figures ranging from scribes to pharaohs, objects from the tomb of Tutankhamen, mummies of kings and even young children, steles, and lovely jewelry. Views from outside the museum include archaeological digs, quarries, and on-site tombs. Images from the Garrett archive are a great addition to Scholars Resource's documentation of museum objects. They help bring to life the physical process of unearthing objects and set them into the broader context of culture and history. They add to our understanding of works of art and how they relate to their origin on a multi-disciplinary level.
  • Saskia: The Saskia archive is well known for its extensive in-depth coverage of works from the major museums in Berlin, Dresden, Paris, Vienna, Madrid, Florence, and Rome. The core art history content provides a solid basis for building courses over time and the multitude of revealing details illustrating texture and technique are particularly useful to a variety of disciplines as well as to art historians and studio artists alike.
  
  
• Universal Art Images (pending CU site license)

Other image vendors for scholarly publications:
ARTstor has recently implemented its Images for Academic Publishing (IAP) project. It "seeks to facilitate scholarship in the arts by reducing the costs associated with publishing images in academic journals and similar publications. Image providers participating in IAP have supplied publication-quality images and agreed to make them available free-of-charge for use in scholarly publications. As a service to the community, ARTstor has developed the software to deliver these publication-quality images to users." For more information, visit the IAP web site.

Below are other vendors who license images for use in publications.

• Art Resource
• Artist Rights Society
• Corbis
• Getty Images