Category: Copyright

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Walters Art Museum Goes CCO!

One of the biggest concerns when using images in projects, papers, and presentations is copyright restrictions. That’s why it’s so exciting to report that the Walters Art Museum has made all their digital images, as well as the accompanying metadata, freely available via a Creative Commons Zero license.

What this means is that anyone can use any image from their website, for any purpose, without permission or fear of violating any copyright restrictions. The digital images are of high quality, easy to search, and simple to download. Those looking for higher-resolution images for publishing are encouraged to contact their photo services department.

The museum is encyclopedic in scope and offers thousands of images of artwork from the ancient world, Asia, Medieval and Renaissance Europe, and the Islamic world.

 

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25,000+ Downloadable Images from Artsy Education

Artsy recently announced the launch of Artsy Education and the ability to download 25,000+ open-access images.

Powered by The Art Genome Project, Artsy is a free website with a library of 50,000+ images from 650+ museum, nonprofit, and gallery partners, social media tools for telling stories about art, and e-commerce functionality to facilitate gallery sales and institutional fundraising.

More information about downloading images from Artsy is available here.

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UK National Portrait Gallery Images for Academic Use

The National Portrait Gallery now provides free downloads of a large range of images from its Collection for academic and non-commercial projects through a new web-site facility. Over 53,000 low-resolution images will now be available free of charge to non-commercial users through a standard ‘Creative Commons’ licence and over 87,000 high-resolution images will also be available free of charge for academic use through the Gallery’s own licences.

After searching or browsing to find an image you’d like to download, click “Use this image.” You will be brought to three separate licensing agreements. The Creative Commons license allows “for limited non-commercial use. Image sizes are 800 pixels on the longest dimension at 72 dpi.” When possible, higher resolution images will be made available through this same process. Be sure to attribute your images and provide links to NPG’s Creative Commons license.

Above image: Henry Fawcett; Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett (née Garrett) by Ford Madox Brown; oil on canvas, 1872. NPG 1603. © National Portrait Gallery, London. Creative Commons License.

For more information, contact the NPG’s licensing office: rightsandimages@npg.org.uk

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ARTstor Images for Academic Publishing

Did you know? ARTstor offers Images for Academic Publishing, allowing you to publish high-quality images in non-commercial publications (including websites) according to terms & conditions set by contributing museums.

The Images for Academic Publishing (IAP) program makes available publication-quality images for use in scholarly publications free of charge. The IAP program was initiated by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2007 to help address the challenges of scholarly publishing in the digital age by providing free images for academic publications through an automated Web-based service. IAP is now available as an optional service to all museums who wish to foster scholarly publications.

To find these images, add IAP to your search string. You can also browse by collection here.

Above image: Hat, Day by Sally Victor, 1944. Image Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Brooklyn Museum Costumes.

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Copyright Case Study: Sculptor vs. US Postal Service

While artist Richard Prince continues to wage his highly publicized appeal against photographer Patrick Cariou, another dispute over copyright — this one involving the federal government — has reached a milestone ruling. A Federal circuit court decided last week that the 87-year-old sculptor behind the Korean War Memorial in Washington, D.C. may be eligible to recover royalty payments from the U.S. Postal Service, which used a photograph of the memorial on stamps and related merchandise without his permission.

Via ArtInfo.

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New Collections from the Index of Christian Art

Three new online image resources from the Index of Christian Art are now available. The first two listed below provide high resolution images for scholarly publications upon request, free of charge.

Romanesque Art Collection

The first of these is a database of some six thousand images of medieval (mainly Romanesque) art taken by a Swiss couple who wish to remain anonymous. The collection of digitized slides covers Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and The Netherlands, and includes many lesser-known sites as well as the more familiar. Most of the images are of sculpture, architecture, or wall paintings. The collection opens with frescoes from the Chapel of Saint Leonard in Naunders, Austria and closes with Amsoldingen Church in Switzerland.

The Lois Drewer Database

When she died some five months ago Lois Drewer left the Index of Christian Art a large and unsorted collection of several thousand slides covering many countries she visited throughout her lifetime. Her wide interest in art and architecture is reflected in this collection — not surprisingly called The Lois Drewer Database — which spans landscape and garden design, to archaeological sites in the Near East, to Romanesque and Gothic architecture, to a considerable focus on Renaissance architecture. Her travels brought her to Austria, Crete, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Libya, the Netherlands, Spain, Syria, Turkey, and the United Kingdom.

Gabriel Millet Collection

The third resource, and certainly the most ambitious of the three, is the first installment of images from a collaborative venture the Index entered into with the Bibliothèque Gabriel Millet in the Sorbonne, Paris. This is to catalogue the entire archive of Byzantine art that was first started in 1903. As it presently stands, the database contains nearly all of the slides (approximately 15,000) in the archive and these provide an unrivalled visual record of Byzantine art, particularly manuscripts, but with wall paintings and other media included as well.

Via the International Center of Medieval Art newsletter.

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High-Quality Images from the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum

The Amsterdam Rijksmuseum has made images from its “basic collection” – a little over 103,000 objects – available under a Creative Commons BY 3.0 license which allows you to:

  • Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work
  • Remix — to adapt the work
  • Make commercial use of the work

These images may be used not only for classroom study and research but also for publishing, as long as the museum receives proper attribution. The collections database, in Dutch, is available here. Over 70,000 objects are also cataloged using ICONCLASS subject headings in English; this interface is available here. Click here for an example of the scan quality.

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High Quality Images for Academic Publishing

Are you hungry for high quality, publishable images to use in your dissertation or manuscript? Trying to avoid expensive licensing fees? Not sure what images are in the public domain?

If so, consider the following resources for copyright-free or copyright-lenient images. Most image sites include both high and low resolution images, with high quality TIFFs available upon request. Please note that each resource/institution may have specific requirements for attribution or limits on print runs. When in doubt, contact the institution before using the images in your publication.

Do you know of additional resources that we should add? Contact us!

General Resources and Guides

Museum Image Resources

Image Resources by Subject

Illustration

Islamic

Medieval

  • Index of Christian Art: Romanesque
  • Index of Christian Art: Lois Drewer Database
  • International Society for the Study of Pilgrimage Art: Peregrinations Photo-bank

Photography

Royalty-Free Images (One-time Fee)

  • Archivision Stock Photos
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Technology and Arts Libraries

A recent Princeton panel discussion summary sheds some light on current topics in arts libraries, including the ways access and preservation change in the digital world. Of note: an exploration of how new media artworks are captured and collected; a reflection on the myriad ways architects digitally design buildings (and the loss of information that sometimes results); and the copyright complexities of licensed, streaming musical performances.

Via IT’s Academic.

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