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- JSTOR ImagesSearch over 3.7 million images from museums, archives, and other similar, identified collections of photos and artwork. Use filters to specify date ranges, source type ("classification"), country, and collection.
Includes the content of Artstor and hundreds of other collections.
- Artstor This link opens in a new windowThe Artstor website was retired on August 1, 2024. Artstor's content, key resources, and functionality are now on JSTOR.
Over 2.5 million digital images in the arts, architecture, humanities, and sciences with a suite of tools for teaching and research. Collections comprise contributions from international museums, photographers, libraries, scholars, photo archives, artists, and artists' estates. Valuable for art history, African-American history, anthropology, decorative arts, fashion and costume, languages and literature, medieval studies, music history, theatre and dance, and much more.
Users can gain additional functionality by registering for an account, including downloading images and creating image groups.
- Digital Public Library of AmericaOver 13 million digitized images, documents, recordings and more from libraries, museums, and archives. Among its various specific pages that may be useful is this list of primary source sets.
Improve your Google searches
Important Limiters for searching Google Images
You can limit your results in Google to pages from specific sites or kinds of sites by including along with your search terms text such as site:wtamu.edu or, for all colleges and universities but only colleges and universities, site:.edu.
This way, even when searching Google Images, you're more likely to get archival content from university collections.
General web collections
- Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online CatalogAbout 1.2 million searchable images from the Library of Congress's pictorial holdings.
- Harper's Bazaar 1867-1900Archive available through Cornell.
- The Flickr CommonsThe photo-sharing site Flickr has a pool of images, The Commons, limited strictly to the digitized photos from the collections several major museums, archives, and libraries.
*Only the little search box in the middle of the main Flickr Commons page searches the Flickr Commons. The search box at the top of the results page will search Flickr generally. To do new searches in the Commons after you've seen some results, go back to the initial main Commons page. - VADS, the Visual Arts Data ServiceBased at the Farnham Campus of the University College for the Creative Arts in Great Britain, this site offers over freely available 100,000 images in many specific organized and searchable collections.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art CollectionsOver 260,000 images of art works, including costumes and clothing from a wide range of eras. Lots of convenient ways to narrow and focus search. Over 16,000 images of costume items since 1900, nearly 8,000 from between 1800 and 1900, about 2500 from the years between 1600 & 1800, and hundreds more from earlier centuries.
Other library databases
- American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals Collection This link opens in a new window
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EBSCOhost access to digitized primary source documents from the late 17th through early 20th centuries in the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals Collection. It includes over 8 million items from several thousand magazines, journals, and other periodical publications from 1684 through 1912, covering "advertising, health, women's issues, science, the history of slavery, industry and professions, religious issues, culture and the arts, and more."
You can also choose any of 50 different more focused thematic collections of these periodicals. To combine multiple collections together, after you click through into one, click "Choose Databases" at the top and select additional collections to add to your search set. - ProQuest Historical Newspapers: U.S. Major Dailies. This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Includes searchable full text of the following newspapers:
- The New York Times—1851-2019
- Wall Street Journal—1889-2011
- Washington Post—1877-2007
- Los Angeles Times—1881-1999
- The Chicago Tribune—1849-1998
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