AHDS Visual Arts Digital Image Collection
http://ahds.ac.uk/visualarts/
AHDS Visual Arts is based at the Farnham Campus of The University College for the Creative Arts, at Canterbury, Epsom, Farnham, Maidstone and Rochester and is one of five Centers, which together with an Executive, make up the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS). Its mission is 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 endeavor, primarily within UK Higher and Further Education.
**NEW** Archimedes Project: Database Machine Drawings
http://dmd.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/
The database DMD is part of the research project The Relation of Practical Experience and Conceptual Structures in the Emergence of Science: Mental Models in the History of Mechanics, a project pursued by Department I of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), Berlin, headed by Jürgen Renn. In its context, a large number of original sources concerning the history of mechanics have been made available on the Internet as a digital research library, the Archimedes Project. In this broader context the database DMD is especially devoted to studying the practical knowledge of early modern engineers.
ArchNet
http://archnet.org/library/
ArchNet is an online community for architects, planners, urban designers, interior designers, landscape architects, and scholars, with a special focus on the Islamic world. ArchNet is an exciting project being developed at the MIT School of Architecture and Planning in close cooperation with, and with the full support of The Aga Khan Trust for Culture, an agency of the Aga Khan Development Network. The Aga Khan Trust for Culture is a private, non-denominational, international development agency with programmes dedicated to the improvement of built environments in societies where Muslims have a significant presence.
Beauty and the Brick: Illustrated Books and 19th-century Design
http://www.hudsonvalley.org/beauty/intro.html
In Beauty and the Brick, an exploration of how and why cultural advisors coached Americans about appropriate architecture and design, selected illustrated volumes from Historic Hudson Valley’s collection make a rare center stage appearance.
Bibliothèque nationale de France - Mandragore manuscript database
http://mandragore.bnf.fr/html/accueil.html
Searchable database of the vast manuscript collection of the Bibliothèque nationale. Many of the illuminations are included and even if they are not this is a useful resource for finding information about the manuscripts themselves.
Bibliothèque nationale de France - Online Exhibitions
http://classes.bnf.fr/classes/pages/inddoss.htm
Curated online exhibitions in French using images of the materials at the Bibliothèque nationale, many of which feature scenes of everyday life in the middle ages and the Renaissance. Images are accompanied by citations, descriptive text, and sometimes with narration and interactive features.
Catena, The Digital Archive of Historic Gardens and Landscapes
http://catena.bgc.bard.edu/index.htm
Sponsored by the Bard Graduate Center through a grant from the National
Endowment for the Humanities, Catena, the Digital Archive of Historic
Gardens and Landscapes and its companion website, is envisioned
as part of a larger, typologically organized archive of digital
images with accompanying educational materials. The initial component
of Catena is built around the villa, an important landscape type
in garden history.
Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection
http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/cushman/index.jsp
Charles Weever Cushman, amateur photographer and Indiana University alumnus, bequeathed approximately 14,500 Kodachrome color slides to his alma mater. The photographs in this collection bridge a thirty-two year span from 1938 to 1969, during which time he extensively documented the United States as well as other countries.
Cleveland Museum of Art
http://www.clevelandart.org/Explore/
A searchable database of the museum's collection, which includes over 2,000 digital images of decorative arts objects.
David Rumsey Visual Collections
http://www.davidrumsey.com/collections/
View maps, fine
artwork, photographs and other items from over thirty
renowned collections. Explore these collections using the Insight® Browser with no download required, or the Insight® Java Client with advanced functionality, requiring one time download. View the collections individually with the Insight Browser or Java Client. With the Insight Java Client, combine several collections from one category, or combine any collection from the View All tab.
**NEW** Domestic Interiors Database
http://www.rca.ac.uk/csdi/didb/index.php
The Domestic Interiors Database is a major outcome from a broad-ranging
analytical survey of the ways in which the interior has been
represented since the Renaissance in Western Europe and North America.
It was compiled by staff at the AHRC Centre for the Study of the
Domestic Interior between September 2001 and August 2006 and is a
contribution to the AHRC’s mission to “ensure that knowledge and understanding generated by arts and humanities research is widely disseminated for the economic, social and cultural benefit of the UK and beyond.”
**NEW** Epact: Scientific Instruments of Medieval and Renaissance Europe
http://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/epact/
Epact is an electronic catalogue of medieval and renaissance scientific instruments from four European museums: the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford, the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza, Florence, the British Museum, London, and the Museum Boerhaave, Leiden. Together, these museums house the finest collections of early scientific instruments in the world. It consists of 520 catalogue entries and a variety of supporting material. All European instruments from the four museums by makers who were active before 1600 have been entered in the catalogue. They include astrolabes, armillary spheres, sundials, quadrants, nocturnals, compendia, surveying instruments, and so on. Examples range from ordinary instruments for everyday use to more extravagant and often lavish pieces destined for the cabinets of princes.
Great Buildings Collection
http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings.html
More than 800 buildings from around the world and across history are listed below and illustrated at this website and on the Great Buildings Collection on CD-ROM with photographic images, architectural drawings, discussion, bibliography, architect information, and live 3D walk-through models.
**NEW** The Japanese Garden
http://learn.bowdoin.edu/japanesegardens/
The web site is dedicated to the gardens of Japan, and more
specifically to the historic gardens of Kyoto and its environs.
Although many of these gardens are located within Zen Buddhist
monasteries, this site does not explore the influence of Zen Buddhism
on Japanese garden design, an influence that is often a matter of
conjecture rather than historical evidence. Instead, the site is
designed to provide the visitor with an opportunity to visit each
garden, to move through or around it, to experience it through the
medium of high-quality color images, and to learn something of its
history.
**NEW** The Japanese Garden Database
http://www.jgarden.org/
The Japanese Garden Database is intended as a repository of information on the historical and contemporary gardens of Japan as well as the gardens located outside Japan that have been inspired by the culture. It is a non-profit, educational web site that seeks to provide information on a selection of outstanding examples of garden art found in Japan while juxtaposing a diversity of media related to them. This juxtaposition is intended to bring about fresh insight to a body of discourse that can often be mired in romanticized and exoticized notions of Asia and the cultures therein.
Library of Congress, Cultural Landscapes, Geography and Map Division
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gmdhtml/setlhome.html
Cultural Landscapes geography is documented in this category by large-scale maps such as individual land surveys, county land ownership maps and atlases, large-scale topographic maps, and thematic maps showing economic activity. These maps show the cultural modification of a physical landscape as settlers established their farmsteads and villages, constructed the connecting transportation systems, and named their surroundings. Some maps show areas occupied by Native Americans, especially after their resettlement by the United States government.
Library of Congress, Online Catalog of the Prints and Photographs Division
http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/catalogabt.html
The Prints and Photographs Online
Catalog (PPOC) contains catalog
records and digital images representing
a rich cross-section of
still pictures held by the Prints & Photographs Division and other units of the Library. The Library of Congress offers broad public access to these materials as a contribution to education and scholarship.About 90% of the records
are accompanied by one or
more digital images. In some collections, only thumbnail images display to those searching outside the Library of Congress because of potential rights considerations.
Metropolitan Museum of Art Collection
http://www.metmuseum.org/collections/
In formation since 1870, the Metropolitan Museum's collection now contains more than two million works of art from all points of the compass, ancient through modern times. About 3,500 objects—fifty highlights from each of the Museum's curatorial departments as well as the entire department of European Paintings—can be searched by artist, period, style, or keyword.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Timeline of Art History
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/splash.htm
The Timeline of Art History is a chronological, geographical, and thematic exploration of the history of art from around the world, as illustrated especially by the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection. The Museum's curatorial, conservation, and education staff—the largest team of art experts anywhere in the world—research and write the Timeline, which is an invaluable reference and research tool for students, educators, scholars, and anyone interested in the study of art history and related subjects. First launched in 2000, the Timeline now extends from prehistory to 1800 A.D., and will continue to expand in scope and depth.
Missouri Botanical Garden Library - Rare books
http://www.illustratedgarden.org/mobot/rarebooks/
This website, presented by the Missouri Botanical Garden Library and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, features 77 digitized volumes from its rare book collection. Their goal is to digitize and preserve beautifully illustrated and botanically significant books in their private holdings in order to make them available to an international audience.
Morgan Library and Museum (Online Catalog, Corsair)
http://corsair.morganlibrary.org/
Thousands
of digital images from the Library’s renowned collection of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts are now available in CORSAIR. The collection spans some ten centuries of Western illumination, and contains manuscripts from all the major schools, including some of the great masterpieces of medieval manuscript art. The images and accompanying descriptions are the product of an extraordinary collaboration between the Library and the Index of Christian Art to photograph, digitize, and describe all significant illustrations within the Library’s medieval and Renaissance manuscripts. CORSAIR currently offers more than twenty thousand medieval images, and the number is constantly growing.
**NEW** National Agricultural Library, Special Collections
http://www.nal.usda.gov/speccoll/collectionsguide.shtml
The Special Collections of the NAL houses over 300 manuscript and archival collections containing materials from the 19th through the 21st centuries. Manuscript collections held by Special Collections are papers of individuals who worked for or were associated with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), or who were involved in agricultural activities. Archival collections consist of records of organizations or associations related to agriculture. Portions of these have been made available online and can be searched by keyword or browsed by subject.
National Gallery of Art, Washington
http://www.nga.gov/collection/index.shtm
The National Gallery of Art houses one of the finest collections in the world illustrating major achievements in painting, sculpture, and graphic arts from the Middle Ages to the present. Search the collection by specific artist, title, or a combination of criteria.
The National Gallery, London
http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/collection/default_online.htm
The entire National Gallery permanent collection and long-term loans are illustrated and described in the collection online.
New York Historical Society
http://emuseum.nyhistory.org/
Catalogue of images in the Henry III Luce Center for the Study of American Culture. There are images of objects in the following areas: painting, sculpture, furniture, decorative objects, and tools. The searchable database provides access to the descriptive record for each object.
New York Public Library Digital Gallery
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/
NYPL Digital Gallery provides access to over 337,000 images digitized from
primary sources and printed rarities in the collections of The New York Public
Library, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints and photographs, illustrated books, printed ephemera, and more.
Oxford University Digital Library, Digital Collections from the Oxford University and Bodleian Libraries
http://www.odl.ox.ac.uk/collections.htm
Oxford University is internationally renowned for its scholarly library collections, and in particular for those of the Bodleian Library which has been a library of deposit for almost 400 years. The University has a long tradition in digital scholarship and there are a number of completed library projects focusing on the digitization of primary resources.
The Perseus Digital Library, Tufts
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/
Perseus is an evolving digital library, engineering interactions through time, space, and language. Its primary goal is to bring a wide range of source materials to as large an audience as possible. It is especially strong in Classical texts and images, some of which can be downloaded.
Royal Academy of Arts
http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/
For the first time ever the Royal Academy is making its Collection accessible online. This is the result of an exciting project to conserve, photograph and catalogue the Royal Academy's collection of works of art, books and archives. This project will ultimately allow users to access and search the great diversity of the Academy's collections including paintings, sculptures, plaster casts, drawings, prints, historic photographs, archives and historic books. Images will also be accessible online for many of the objects.
SAH Image Exchange
http://www.sah.org/imagex.html
At the annual meeting in St. Louis in April 1996, an idea of image sharing on the Web (or possibly on CD) was proposed and discussed. The idea would be for members to contribute their own slides of buildings, things they could volunteer for shared educational use. These would then be scanned at a consistent standard, and made available freely to members and students over the Web for non-profit educational use,for use on monitors and through projection in the classroom. Plans and additional graphics might be sought among older volumes clearly in the public domain.
Smithsonian Archives Image Gallery
http://sirismm.si.edu/siris/sirisimagegallery.htm
The SIRIS Image Gallery contains a sampling of archival visual records that are part of the Smithsonian Institution Research Information System's main catalog. It includes over 110,000 electronic images from several archival repositories at the Smithsonian. You may browse these images by archival repositories or by their physical forms.
Tate Collection
http://www.tate.org.uk/
The Tate holds the national collections of British Art and of international modern art. The entire Tate Collection can be found on this site, each work with its own information page.
Victoria and Albert Museum Image Collection
http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/index.html
Search for over 20,000 works and over 26,000 images from the V&A's collections, including ceramics, fashion, furniture, glass, metalwork, paintings, photographs, prints, sculpture, and textiles, as well as curated exhibitions on a variety of decorative arts topics.
Virginia Tech Imagebase
http://imagebase.lib.vt.edu/
Virginia Tech's image database, which is maintained as part of its Digital Library, contains an assortment of images of archival collections with topics ranging from culinary history and landscape history to theater history and sheet music. Not all images in this database are available to users outside of the Virginia Tech community.
Web Gallery of Art
http://www.wga.hu/index.html
The Web Gallery of Art is a virtual museum and searchable database of
European painting and sculpture from 12th to mid-19th centuries. It was
started in 1996 as a topical site of the Renaissance art, originated in
the Italian city-states of the 14th century and spread to other
countries in the 15th and 16th centuries. Intending to present
Renaissance art as comprehensively as possible, the scope of the
collection was later extended to show its Medieval roots as well as its
evolution to Baroque and Rococo via Mannerism. More recently the
periods of Neoclassicism and Romanticism were also included.
