Tag: copyright-free images

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Images on the Web Museums

New Zealand Museum Releases 30,000 Images

The Te Papa Museum of New Zeland has released more than 30,000 high resolution images for download and re-use! To find images that can be reused, the search box is equipped with a radio button to allow users to select “with downloadable images.”

The Te Papa museum collection contains “artworks, objects, and specimens,” from “dinosaur teeth to contemporary art,” and as such presents two advanced search options for object and specimen to allow users to query different metadata fields.

For more information about the Creative Commons license governing the re-use of Te Papa’s images, check out their recent blog post about the initiative. Click here to explore the collection!

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Images on the Web

Wellcome Library Releases High-Resolution Images Free of Charge

From the Wellcome Library:

We are delighted to announce that over 100,000 high resolution images including manuscripts, paintings, etchings, early photography and advertisements are now freely available through Wellcome Images.

Drawn from our vast historical holdings, the images are being released under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licence.

This means that they can be used for commercial or personal purposes, with an acknowledgement of the original source (Wellcome Library, London). All of the images from our historical collections can be used free of charge.

The images can be downloaded in high-resolution directly from the Wellcome Images website for users to freely copy, distribute, edit, manipulate, and build upon as you wish, for personal or commercial use. The images range from ancient medical manuscripts to etchings by artists such as Vincent Van Gogh and Francisco Goya.

The earliest item is an Egyptian prescription on papyrus, and treasures include exquisite medieval illuminated manuscripts and anatomical drawings, from delicate 16th century fugitive sheets, whose hinged paper flaps reveal hidden viscera to Paolo Mascagni’s vibrantly coloured etching of an ‘exploded’ torso.

Other treasures include a beautiful Persian horoscope for the 15th-century prince Iskandar, sharply sketched satires by Rowlandson, Gillray and Cruikshank, as well as photography from  Eadweard Muybridge’s studies of motion. John Thomson’s remarkable nineteenth century portraits from his travels in China can be downloaded, as well a newly added series of photographs of hysteric and epileptic patients at the famous Salpêtrière Hospital.

Above Image: Wellcome Library, London. Horoscope of Prince Iskandar, grandson of Tamerlane, the Turkman Mongol conqueror.

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Images on the Web News VRC

British Library Adds 1 Million Public Domain Images to Flickr

The British Library recently added more than one million images from more than 65,000 public domain books published in the 17–19th centuries to its Flickr Commons page with a CC0 license to encourage users to remix, reuse, and repurpose the images. Included in the million images are geological diagrams, illustrations, comics, illuminations, landscapes, paintings, and more.

The images on Flickr have a set of descriptive tags to help identify the works, including the year of publication, the book record number, and author. Plans for a crowd sourcing project to add more robust descriptive information about the images are in the works for next year.

Check out the British Library Flickr Commons!

Via BoingBoing and the British Library’s Digital Scholarship Blog.

Image taken from page 182 of ‘Onze aarde. Handboek der natuurkundige aardrijkskunde … Met 150 platen en 20 kaartjes in afzonderlijken Atlas’

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Images on the Web Museums News

The Morgan Begins Digitizing 10,000 Drawings

The Morgan Library and Museum in New York recently announced that it is embarking on a year-long program to digitize its collection of more than 10,000 drawings (including 2,000 versos) dating from the 14th to 21st centuries. The images will be available in a digital library that will provide a robust catalog record with a high resolution image. The digital library will be open to the public, and images will be available for download for use in non-commercial situations including “classroom presentations, dissertations, and educational websites devoted to the fine arts.”

So, get excited about the new digital library, which will hopefully be ready for launch in October 2014. The Morgan has future plans to digitize their print collection, which would be another fantastic resource.

For more information about the project, check out the Morgan’s press release. In the meantime, don’t forget that the Morgan has other valuable online resources available now, including Collection Highlights, Online Exhibitions, and Music Manuscripts.

Via ArtDaily

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Innovative Technology VRC

Europeana Open Culture App

This summer, the Europeana digital library launched its first app, Open Culture, which includes a selection of 350,000 images from its online collection of cultural objects from Europe’s institutions. The app is organizied around five curated themes, including Maps and Plans, Treasures of Art, Treasures of the Past, Treasures of Nature, and Images of the Past.

Users can perform keyword searches in the app, or browse through a visual wall of image thumbnails. You can also save favorites, add comments, and share object records on Facebook or Twitter. Perhaps best of all: the images included in the Europeana Open Culture app are either in the public domain or openly licensed, so they may be used for any publishing purpose.

For more information, stop by the VRC to explore Open Culture on our iPad, or visit the App Store.

Via Europeana Blog

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Images on the Web Museums News VRC

New CLIR/Mellon Report on Museum Policies for Open Access to Images

In June 2013, the Council of Library and Information Resources in conjunction with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation published the report Images of Works of Art in Museum Collections: The Experience of Open Access. The report, written by Kristin Kelly, examined the policies, websites, and procedures of 11 large museums to get determine the state of open access to images.

The report has been added to our web page about Copyright Resources for Academic Publishing, which provides a list of general guides and resources as well as lists repositories that have copyright-free or copyright-lenient policies towards letting users download high quality image files of works of art. We try to keep this web page up-to-date, so if you’re aware of any collections that should be included, please don’t hesitate to let us know!

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Image Quality Images on the Web Museums News VRC

New LACMA Collections Website + 20,000 Images to Download

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art recently launched a new collections website that features a faceted search engine that facilitates both browsing and direct searching of the museum’s objects. Most importantly, however, is LACMA’s initiative to release nearly 20,000 high-quality images of art objects from their collection believed to be in the public domain. Users can freely download the images and use them as they see fit.

In the object view above, we’ve circled the location of the “Download Image” feature to highlight where to find it. After you press the button, the image will immediately download for you to save and use as you see fit, providing it is inline with LACMA’s Terms of Use.

If you want to see all of the public domain objects for which downloading a high-quality image is possible, run a search on your research term and select “Show only unrestricted images” at the top of the page. Alternatively, if you’d like to all 20,000 objects LACMA has made freely downloadable, run a blank search and select “Show only results with unrestricted images” from the top of the page.

For more information, visit the LACMA Collections or consult the Terms of Use.

For even more information, we keep our list of Copyright Lenient Images for Academic Publishing up-to-date.

Via Unframed

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Images on the Web Moving Images News VRC

The Public Domain Review

The Public Domain Review (a project of the Open Knowledge Foundation) is a great resource that highlights a variety of digitized public domain resources and curated collections, including images, film, text, and audio. In addition, there are scholarly articles from various humanities disciplines that engage with the digital materials included on the site.

The Public Domain Review is a not-for-profit project dedicated to showcasing the most interesting and unusual out-of-copyright works available online.

All works eventually fall out of copyright – from classic works of art, music and literature, to abandoned drafts, tentative plans, and overlooked fragments. In doing so they enter the public domain, a vast commons of material that everyone is free to enjoy, share and build upon without restriction.

We believe the public domain is an invaluable and indispensable good, which – like our natural environment and our physical heritage – deserves to be explicitly recognised, protected and appreciated.

The Public Domain Review aims to help its readers to explore this rich terrain – like a small exhibition gallery at the entrance of an immense network of archives and storage rooms that lie beyond.

The PDR also has a thorough guide to finding interesting public domain works online. Collaborators include the Internet Archive, Europa, the Library of Congress, the Field Museum, the Boston Public Library, the California Digital Library, the Smithsonian Institution, the Getty, and more.

For more information, visit the Public Domain Review.

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Architecture Images on the Web Islamic Photography

Machiel Kiel Archive Online

The Netherlands Institute in Turkey has recently released the first installment of digital images from the vast photographic archives of Dutch historian Machiel Kiel.

A former director of the Netherlands Institute in Turkey (NIT), at which this project is now implemented, Kiel is a scholar whose career has revolved around the study of Ottoman-Islamic architectural monuments in the Balkan countries — an area of study that he pioneered. His archive represents an invaluable source for researchers of this heritage. Created for the most part between the 1960s and 90s, it contains visual documentation of many monuments that have not survived, or have been significantly altered in, the second half of the twentieth century. The publication of Kiel’s archive by the NIT is hoped to significantly advance international research on this heritage.

Images are available for publication free of charge (with attribution). For more information, see the FAQ section of this page.

Categories
Images on the Web Museums

National Gallery of Art Launches NGA Images

Designed by Gallery experts to facilitate learning, enrichment, enjoyment, and exploration, NGA Images features more than 20,000 open access digital images, up to 3,000 pixels each, available free of charge for download and use. The resource is easily accessible through the Gallery’s website, and a standards-based reproduction guide and a help section provide advice for both novices and experts.

With the launch of NGA Images, the National Gallery of Art implements an open access policy for digital images of works of art that the Gallery believes to be in the public domain. Images of these works are now available free of charge for any use, commercial or non-commercial. Users do not need to contact the Gallery for authorization to use these images.

To read more about the NGA Images Open Access policy, click here. Images downloaded from the site also include basic embedded metadata with descriptive information about the artwork. Registration is not required for presentation-sized downloads, and images may be downloaded in groups to save time. Users of NGA Images may wish to sign up for accounts in order access advanced site features, including use of lightboxes (groups of images) for saving and sharing. Registration is also required for reproduction-ready downloads. See some of the most frequently requested images here.