LibGuides: Images: Find images through UVic Libraries

Welcome

This guide will help you locate images and visual resources for your research.

When looking for images online, Google Image Search can be a great starting point, allowing us to search through enormous numbers of images from all over the web. However, often the images are low resolution, and may be missing important information including the origin, copyright, and other contextual metadata relating to the images. This can be a problem when you need to cite your sources.

Specialized image databases can be an excellent tool to find high quality images for your research, along with the necessary information to contextualize them.

This guide will provide you with an introduction to some useful image databases for your research. This will include both restricted databases which you can access using your UVic login credentials and free online repositories.

Image databases - start here

ARTStor
ARTStor is a broad database containing over 3 million items across the visual arts, prints, sculpture, theatre, and more. Browsers may navigate by geographic origin, museum collections of origin, and by topic. It is a very useful place to start your search given the breadth of its collections.
Oxford Art Online
Oxford Art Online provides access to both articles and images, pulling from collections including Grove Art Online, the Benezit Dictionary of Artists, the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, The Oxford Companion to Western Art, and The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms. Use the ‘Format’ filter when searching to select between articles and images in your results.
Europeana
This free database contains over 30 million images and 22 million texts, all from the collections of European museums, heritage organizations, and governments. Search using the magnifying glass icon at the top right of the screen, and use the 'Type of media' filter on the right of the search page to restrict your results to images, texts, video, or audio.

UVic image databases

This list is far from exhaustive! Be sure to check out the open online image collections listed as well as the databases available for your subject.

Index of Medieval Art
This collection includes images and descriptive data related to the iconography of works of art produced between late Antiquity and the sixteenth century. Although the Index of Medieval Art was formerly known as the Index of Christian Art, it now includes secular subjects as well as a growing number of subjects from medieval Jewish and Islamic culture.
Art Full Text (H.W. Wilson)
Indexes art reproductions which appear in indexed periodicals. When searching, use the 'Document type' filter to limit to "art reproduction" results only.
Picture Post Historical Archive (Gale)
The Picture Post Historical Archive comprises the complete archive of the Picture Post from its first issue in 1938 to its last in 1957 - all digitized from originals in full colour. Picture Post provides a fascinating snapshot of British life from the 1930s to the 1950s, with thousands of photos of ordinary people doing ordinary things – from boys rolling a tyre, to a view of a postwar bedsit, to young women on a rollercoaster.
John Johnson Collection
This collection provides access to thousands of items selected from the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera, offering unique insights into the changing nature of everyday life in Britain in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Materials included are many prints from the popular press in categories such as Nineteenth-Century Entertainment, the Booktrade, Popular Prints, Crimes, Murders and Executions, and Advertising.
Berg Fashion Library / Bloomsbury Fashion Central)
Archive of fashion and fashion history, which includes articles as well as images. Use the content filters on the left of the search results page to select for images only.
Nineteenth Century Collections Online - NCCO (Gale)
Broad primary source collection focussing on the history, art, culture, and society of 'the long nineteenth century' from a global perspective. Search and then scroll down to select 'photographs' or 'maps' to filter by results type.
Romanticism: Life, Literature & Landscape (Adam Matthew Digital)
Collection of materials from the Wordsworth Trust, all related to early 19th century Romantic art. Includes paintings, landscape photographs, and written manuscripts and correspondence of Romantic artists and authors.

Featured Resources

ACRL Visual Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education
more...less...
Visual literacy is a set of abilities that enables an individual to effectively find, interpret, evaluate, use, and create images and visual media. Visual literacy skills equip a learner to understand and analyze the contextual, cultural, ethical, aesthetic, intellectual, and technical components involved in the production and use of visual materials.