LibGuides: Art Senior Exhibit Seminar: Select Image Databases

Select Image Databases

New York Public Library Digital Collections
Explore well over a half a million items digitized from The New York Public Library's collections. Spanning a wide range of historical eras, geography, and media, NYPL Digital Collections offers drawings, illuminated manuscripts, maps, photographs, posters, prints, rare illustrated books, videos, audio, and more. Encompassing the subject strengths of the vast collections of The Library, these materials represent the applied sciences, fine and decorative arts, history, performing arts, and social sciences.

Getty Publications Virtual Library
Publisher of materials that cover art, photography, archaeology, architecture, conservation, and the humanities for both the general public and specialists. The Virtual Library contains over 250 free and downloadable titles.
MoMA Exhibition History
Digital catalog of exhibitions held by the Museum of Modern Art from 1929 to present.
Open Access at the Met
Resource provides data about The Met collection, including over 492,000 images of public-domain artworks, available for free and unrestricted use.
Paris Musées Collections Portal
From Smithsonian Magazine:

Now, in a sign of the changing times, the public institution that oversees 14 major museums in Paris is helping audiences around the world easily access and enjoy Courbet’s notorious painting—along with a trove of other important artworks. As Valentina Di Liscia reports for Hyperallergic, Paris Musées has made 100,000 digital reproductions of works held by the city’s museums available free of charge.

The images were released under the Creative Commons Zero license, meaning that the files have been dedicated to the public domain “as completely as possible.” Visitors to the Paris Musées collections portal can now download a file that contains a high-resolution digital version of a given artwork, details about the image, and a guide for using and citing it. Works still under copyright can also be downloaded through the portal but are only available as low-resolution images.

Paris Musées, which manages such diverse institutions as the Petit Palais, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Maison de Balzac and the Catacombs, began making its collections accessible online in 2016. To date, more than 320,000 images—a substantial portion of the roughly one million works held by the organization’s museums—have been digitized.
World Digital Library
The World Digital Library (WDL) is a project of the U.S. Library of Congress, carried out with the support of the United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (UNESCO), and in cooperation with libraries, archives, museums, educational institutions, and international organizations from around the world.

The WDL makes it possible to discover, study, and enjoy cultural treasures and significant historical documents on one site, in a variety of ways. Content on the WDL includes books, manuscripts, maps, newspapers, journals, prints and photographs, sound recordings, and films.