From www.taylor.edu - Taylor University, integrating faith and learning

Art Web Sites

As there are a plethora of art-related web sites out there, we have selected for inclusion on this page a list of "Librarian Approved" sites useful for research purposes. If you are aware of any that we have overlooked, please send us your suggestions. You can find us in a variety of ways: Ask-A-Librarian.

 

Vocabulary Source

  • The Getty
    The Art & Architecture Thesaurus ® (AAT), the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names ® (TGN), and the Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN) are structured vocabularies that can be used to improve access to information about art, architecture, and material culture.

Open Sources

  • Art Images for College Teaching
    Survey of images made available by its author, art historian and visual resources curator Allan T. Kohl. Emphasis on ancient, medieval, and Renaissance European art and architecture.

  • Artcyclopedia
    Database that can be searched by artist name, title of work, or museum name. Results include links to museums and art image galleries, image archives, other web sites, and articles.

  • Artserve
    The site, containing some 450,000 images is 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 great majority of images are conventional stills, but there are ongoing experiments with panoramas and with stereo, and also with hotspotted and zoomable presentations of individual artworks and sites. Art & Architecture mainly from the Mediterranean Basin, Japan, India & Cambodia.

  • The Dictionary of Art Historians
    A biographical/bibliographical lexicon of historic scholars of art.

  • Finding Images on the Web
    Boston University guide to finding images. Very useful and often referred to in the visual resource community.

  • Mother of all Art and Art History
    University of Michigan's compilation of art history departments, research resources, image collections, museums, online exhibitions. Really is referred to as the "mother" site.

  • Visual Collections, Images of Art, History, and Culture
    Images from over 40 collections, representing fine art, historical maps, posters, rare books, manuscripts, and photographs. There are both free and subscription based collections.

  • Whitcombe: Art History Resources on the web
    Full coverage of history of art, research resources, museums. Lots of information and links but no search options.

  • World Wide Web Virtual Library: History of Art
    Links relating to Art History and computer applications in Art History. The site is sponsored by CHArt, the Computers and History of Art Group.

Institution / Museum Collections

  • American Memory
    The American Memory Historical Collections, a major component of the Library's National Digital Library Program, are multimedia collections of digitized documents, photographs, recorded sound, moving pictures, and text from the Library's Americana collections. There are more than 90 collections in the American Memory Historical Collections.

  • Art and Architecture, Courtauld Institute of Art
    More than 40,000 images and a network of over half a million links.

  • Art Kiosk, California State University (K.Cohen)
    WorldArt image database allows you to search over 35,000 images from throughout the world. Created by Kathleen Cohen with other faculty, staff and students of the California State University.

  • British Museum, Compass
    Features around 5000 objects from the huge range of periods and cultures represented in the Museum.

  • Fine Art Museums of San Francisco
    The Imagebase is a searchable image and text database of objects from the collections (110,000) of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

  • Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog
    This online catalog features nearly one million digital images taken from the Library's 50+ collections of prints and photographs.

  • Metropolitan Museum of Art
    Searchable database of 3,500+ objects including 50 highlights from each of the Museum's curatorial departments as well as the entire department of European Paintings; searchable by artist, period, style, or keyword. Of particular note is the Timeline of Art History - a chronological, geographical, and thematic exploration of the history of art from around the world, as illustrated especially by the museum's collection.

  • NYPL Digital Gallery
    Spanning a wide range of visual media, NYPL Digital Gallery offers thousands of digital images of drawings, illuminated manuscripts, maps, photographs, posters, prints, rare illustrated books, and more. Encompassing the subject strengths of the vast collections of the Research Libraries, these materials represent the applied sciences, fine and decorative arts, history, performing arts, and social sciences. Collections cover artworks and objects, creators, dance, design, furniture, motion pictures, music, ornament, performance, spectacle, theatre, advertising, bookbinding, dust jackets, friendship books, menus, post cards, posters, trade and greeting cards.

Other Image Sites

  • ARTstor
    Large and growing database (and presentation tool) of digital images in the arts, humanities and social sciences. The image collections (almost 500,000 images) cover architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, design, and many other forms of visual materials. All periods and many cultures are represented.

  • Google Images
    Quick and convenient image searching. Copyright and image quality is a concern. Can be useful for teaching and obtaining hard to find images of random architectural sites. Google Scholar can also be of use as it has images within context.

Most of the information on this page was gathered and annotated by Elizabeth Ehrnst, MLS from Indiana University's SLIS program.

Ask-a-Librarian for more information



Created by Lana Wilson, Reference Librarian

Last revised October 06, 2009 - 06:03 PM