Flickr Commons
It can be tempting to simply do a Google Images search. However, the information about the images is often incomplete and quality is often poor. Flickr Commons can be a better way to find images with adequate information and of a high enough quality to present. Many archives and museums belong to Flickr Commons (the Library of Congress, for instance).
Digital Image Wiki (a collection of links to image resources created by an art history intern at Wellesley in 2007 and sorted by time period)
VADS (over 100,000 images available for educational use)
WorldImages (a collection of images compiled by art historian Kathleen Cohen for educational use)
It can be tempting to simply do a Google Images search. However, the information about the images is often incomplete and quality is often poor. Flickr Commons can be a better way to find images with adequate information and of a high enough quality to present. Many archives and museums belong to Flickr Commons (the Library of Congress, for instance).
Digital Image Wiki (a collection of links to image resources created by an art history intern at Wellesley in 2007 and sorted by time period)
VADS (over 100,000 images available for educational use)
WorldImages (a collection of images compiled by art historian Kathleen Cohen for educational use)
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| 'Cockatoo flying', 1887, Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904); Collotype process; 'Animal Locomotion' collection New Media Museum, accessed on Flickr Commons |
Museum websites are a good source for images; a list of museums with excellent websites appears on the left side of this subject guide. Several of them, including the British Museum, have free services that provide access to digital images for educational purposes. Others, like the Smithsonian American Art Museum, allow you to gather images into a "collection" when you create an account on their site to help you keep track of images.
Citing an image
- check with your professor to see if there is a preferred method of citing images
- images can be cited in a list of illustrations or in the captions
- provide enough information to find the image again
- include the artist, title, medium, dimensions, and location (museum) of the art work, and the resource you obtained it from (website, book, periodical).
It is perfectly acceptable within copyright law to capture, download, or even scan an image for educational use in a research paper or in a presentation provided that you cite the source for the image.