Visual resources: Subscribed databases

The ARTstor Digital Libary has close to 2 million art, architecture, humanities, and science digital images. You can search and browse in ARTstor for images from museums, libraries, archives, and estates.

The British Museum Images collection provides images depicting world culture and history including ceramics, sculpture, prints, drawings, and paintings

The Federal Archives keeps approx. 12 million still pictures, aerial photographs and posters from modern German history. First photographs date from the 1860ties. Most pictures show events and/or persons.

The historical map collection has over 75,000 maps and images online. The collection includes rare 16th through 21st century maps of America, North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Pacific and the World.

The East Asia Image Collection (EAIC) is an open-access archive of digitized photographs, negatives, postcards, rare books and slides under the general editorship of Paul D. Barclay, Associate Professor of History, Lafayette College and the direction of Eric Luhrs, Director of Digital Scholarship Services, Lafayette College Library. The EAIC documents the history of imperial Japan (1868-1945), its Asian empire (1895-1945) and occupied Japan (1947-52). Images of Taiwan 台湾, Japan 日本, China 中国, Korea 朝鮮, Manchuria 満洲国, and Indonesia are included.

The photography collection at the George Eastman Museum, among the oldest and best in the world, comprises more than 400,000 photographic objects dating from the introduction of the medium in 1839 through to the present day. It encompasses works made in all major photographic processes, from daguerreotype to digital, includes work by more than eight thousand photographers, and continues to expand.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has made 400,000 digital images in the public domain available and free to use. Images labeled with 'OASC' can be downloaded in high-res.

Oxford Art Online is not an image database; it consists of Oxford's art reference materials as well as articles and bibliographies. However, all the images available in the Oxford art reference works are available through this database.

A sub-collections of the 19th century collections online, 'Photography: The World through the Lens' assembles collections of photographs, photograph albums, photographically illustrated books and texts on the early history of photography from libraries and archives from across the globe. Some images are well-known while many have rarely been viewed.

This is a collection of “persuasive” cartography: ​more than 800 ​ maps intended primarily to influence opinions or beliefs - to send a message - rather than to communicate geographic information. The collection reflects a variety of persuasive tools ​, including​ allegorical, satirical and pictorial mapping; selective inclusion; unusual use of projections, color, graphics and text; and intentional deception. Maps in the collection address a wide range of messages: religious, political, military, commercial, moral and social.

The Rijksmuseum has put 150,000 images online, including those of European masterpieces. If you sign up for a free account and create your own 'Rijkstudio' you can download and use these images.

The World Digital Library provides free access to manuscripts, rare books, maps, photographs, and other important cultural documents from all countries and cultures, in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.