The Web Library:
Building a World Class Personal Library with Free Web Resources
Online companion to the
book.
Frequently updated: last update = 5-24-06
copyright
Nick
Tomaiuolo 2005
Chapter Six: When Image Is Everything
Art Images for College Teaching (AICT)
The express purpose of this database, which offers 1,100 images personally photographed by the site’s
creator, art historian and visual resources librarian Allan Kohl, is to freely disseminate images of important art and
architecture. The collection is organized into five categories: Ancient,
Medieval, Renaissance & Baroque, 18th – 20th
Century, and Non-Western, but one cannot search for specific images. Each
photograph is concisely described and accompanied by cross references to
where the subject is discussed in one or more of 20 widely used art
history survey textbooks. Emphasizing that the site is a “Free Use
Educational Resource,” Kohl encourages any use that is both educational
and non-commercial, which will help faculty without the resources to buy
access to expensive collections.
Big Search Engine Index to
Images
Links to popular and lesser known image depositories.
Biomed Images from Sci7
Search access to 21500 images.
British Library Images
This resource that gives you instant access
to thousands of images from the British Library’s unparalleled collections.
Allows you to search, order and purchase and download images.
Note: the site states, "If
you require Low Resolution images (72dpi) for personal or school use you can
simply copy the images free of charge."
ClipArt.Com
6 million low cost images; offers
online subscriptions for clipart, web
graphics, photos, and fonts.
Ditto
A
reasonably good tool for locating images and relevant sites where the
images originate.
Excite
Image Search
(select "photos" button)
FAST Multimedia Search
Large search engine -- second only to Google -- culling the web for your
keywords.
Google
Image Search
According to Google, it searches 425,000,000 images. Advanced search
options are available; searches can be performed in "Safesearch" mode
[screened for adult content --not necessarily reliable].
"Images
Canada" A bilingual site offering thousands of images
warranted for non-commercial use. Images Canada is a portal to its
partnering websites photo collections (users may search or use
preformulated "image trails").
Images of History on the Web
Read this article by David Mattison and
discover excellent sites for historical images.
Ithaki
Image and Photo Metasearch
Ithaki uses
Google, Dino Cobion,
Visoo, Altavista Images, Fast Picture Search/All the Web, Picsearch, and
Art.com.
Ithaki
Multimedia Metasearch
Search the most efficient multimedia search engines simultaneously; finds
Webcams, midis, MP3s; the image search is a subset of the multimedia
search engine.
Lightbox
Photography
Travel photographs --
mainly
Europe, Asia, and Africa
Lycos
Multimedia Search
Sometimes locates images that Google does not find.
New York Times Photo Archives
This is a commercial site, designed to
display images that you may be persuaded to purchase, but it's 1,200
searchable photos from the past 100 years may interest you.
PhotoZone (U.S. Census Bureau)
Public domain images. You may use the
photos in newsletters, flyers, brochures or other informational materials.
Picsearch
Relatively family friendly, Picsearch seems to automatically
screen out adult content even when searched with suggestive
words and phrases.
Public Health Image Library from the Centers for Disease Control. "PHIL" allows keyword searching for photos, illustrations and multimedia files. For example, a quick search on "syndrome" yields 115 hits, most in the public domain. The files include explanations of the images; the images are downloadable.
Thinker
Image Base
The ImageBase is a searchable image and text database of objects from the
collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (the de Young Museum
and the Legion of Honor). The collections (110,000+ objects) belong to the
people of the City and County of San Francisco. The ImageBase is an
expression of the Museum's mission to provide meaningful public access to
the collections and behave more like a resource and less like a
repository.
Examples
of Image Collections
American Memory at the
Library of Congress
You can enter any of 64 specific collections (e.g., Leonard Bernstein, Ansel Adams, baseball cards, the Golden Age of Jazz and others) or search
the collections.
Artcyclopedia
150,000 works of art.
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)
Awed by natural disasters? Search
in a database of 9,200 digital images. And because, in general, FEMA
images are not copyrighted, you can use them in presentations, reports,
and Web pages. The site has an accurate search engine, which makes looking
for images of hurricanes and the rubble at Ground Zero simple.
Free Images.com
A useful site for locating clip art, photos, and other graphics.
Free Images
and Free Stock Photos
Free images is a
high quality resource of digital stock photographic images for use by all.
All images are free to use on websites and printed materials (Terms
Apply). But users may not redistribute these images as a collection or
part of a collection. If you use our images a credit to the site is
required. All the images are original to the site. Most images are
1152x864 or 1200x1600, all are 24-bit maximum quality jpeg.
FreeFoto.com
FreeFoto.com is a
large collection of free photographs for private non-commercial use on the
Internet. The comprehensive, yet easy to navigate site features 50 main
sections with over 1600 sub headings. The photographs are free to private
non-commercial users and for sale to other users. 58,000 exclusive images.
Prints and
Photographs Reading Room at the Library of Congress
See collections from
popular topics including presidential inaugurations, or
search the
prints/photographs collections.
TroveNet
Metasearch
for digital images, including architecture, art, sheet music, digital
text, posters, maps, and manuscripts in the collections of
seventy institutions.
United States Department of
Agriculture Image Gallery
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Browse or search a
comprehensive collection of graphics related to animals, crops,
research, and insects.
Visual
Collections presented by David Rumsey
Visual Collections allows you to view more than 300,000 images,
including Rumsey's incredible historical map collection. Over 30 individual collections are organized on this page into tabs at the page top.
They include architecture, cartography, fine arts, "other" and photography -- or
choose the tab that says "View All." Caution: some of the collections
are fee-based (e.g., the
expansive AMICO Library) but the majority of the sites presented
here at viewable without charge.
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