Open Access Images from the Met

Edo culture (Court of Benin, Nigeria), Queen Mother Pendant Mask: Iyoba, 16th century, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Edo culture (Court of Benin, Nigeria), Queen Mother Pendant Mask: Iyoba, 16th century, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has made more than 400,000 images of public domain works in its collection available for non-commercial use through its new Open Access for Scholarly Content (OASC) initiative. You may now download images from its website and use them for scholarly purposes–including print and online publication–without having to request permission or pay a fee. The Museum is letting users decide if their own projects qualify as “scholarly” or “non-commercial”; you can find definitions and examples on the Met’s OASC FAQ page. You may also want to consult the fine print in the Terms and Conditions for the Met’s website. Commercial use of these images is not permitted.

This is not the first time the Metropolitan Museum of Art has made its images available for free. You have been able to download large images for personal use since its website was redesigned a few years ago, and its collection has been the cornerstone of Artstor’s Images for Academic Publishing (IAP) since that program’s creation. OASC gives users yet another avenue for accessing and using the Met’s images.

Artstor and Shared Shelf in UDaily

ARTstor logoYou probably already know that UD is a longtime subscriber to Artstor, but you may not know what Shared Shelf and Shared Shelf Commons (sometimes called “Artstor Commons”) are.

UDaily has just published an article about Artstor and Shared Shelf at UD that may answer some of your questions. The Visual Resources Center has been working with Artstor and the UD Library for years, so please feel free to contact me anytime if you need more information about any of these services!

New Online Resources

Hindenburg disaster, 1937, film still from British Pathé

Hindenburg disaster, 1937, film still from British Pathé

A number of new online sources for images, text, and video are now available: