Research Guides: Images & Visual Literacy: Images in Databases

Images in Databases

These are image databases that you have access to as a Dickinson College student. ARTstor is the largest and premier database for art and architecture images online.

Dickinson's Visual Resources Collection
Dickinson-owned images with metadata that span the History of Art and Architecture from prehistoric times to the present.

ARTstor This link opens in a new window
Artstor website retires as a separate website on Aug. 1, 2024; Get started with Artstor on JSTOR
Explore quality images covering the visual arts, architecture, archaeology, fashion, geography, the performing arts, science, and technology. Collections feature visual media from leading museums, photo archives, scholars, and artists, which have been rights-cleared for educational use. ***It is necessary to turn off your browser's pop-up blocker for ARTstor to work properly.*** Recommended instructions for using ARTstor are available on Youtube and the ARTstor website. Coverage: all eras, contains primary sources. Full text.
Berg Fashion Library (Bloomsbury) This link opens in a new window
Access eBooks, museum exhibitions, images, lesson plans and bibliographic guides on fashion and related fields, including the full text of the Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion and an extensive color image bank. This collection is useful for research in fashion, theatre & dance, anthropology, art history, history, American studies, and cultural studies. Coverage: varies, contains primary sources. Full text.
Index of Medieval Art This link opens in a new window
Access images of Christian, secular, and other religiously oriented Medieval art, in color and black and white images. This collection includes art from medieval Jewish and Islamic culture. Coverage: late antiquity to the 16th century, contains primary sources. Full text.

Images Online

These websites organize online images for scholarly use with many archival and art images.

NYPL Digital Library
A living database with new materials added every day, featuring prints, photographs, maps, manuscripts, streaming video, and more.
Google Arts & Culture
Artworks, collections, and stories from all around the world in a new way and explore cultural treasures in extraordinary detail.
Web Gallery of Art
Virtual museum of Western Fine art.
Worldimages
Approximately 80,000+ images are held in this image database brought by San Jose State University. Please check the conditions of use for each image that is utilized in your project. For further inquiries please contact me at the information below.
Dickinson's Visual Resources Collection
Must be on campus and affiliated with Dickinson to use.
Yale University's Digital Collections
Yale University Library's database for their digital collection.

Images from Museums

Many museums are now offering high quality scans of their collections online for use by students and scholars.

Smithsonian Institution
An online catalog containing most of Smithsonian major collections from their museums, archives, libraries, and research units.
Rijksstudio
Over 125,000 images from the Rijksmuseum.
Walters Art Museum
High quality digital images.
LACMA - Image Library
Thousands of high quality downloadable images of artworks from LACMA in the public domain—available without restriction, free of charge for educational use.
NGA Images
Open access images from the National Gallery of Art available to download for educational use.
Getty Open Content Program
The Getty Museum's program to allow open access to images of their collections.

Waidner-Spahr Library

Images & Visual Literacy: Images in Databases

Images in Databases

Images Online

Images from Museums