Images from the Museum of New Zealand

John Gully, Milford Sound, 1883, watercolor, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington

John Gully, Milford Sound, 1883, watercolor, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington

The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington has made over 30,000 images of works from its collection available for free download. Over 14,000 of these are released under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND license that requires attribution and prohibits any commercial use or the making of derivatives. The remaining 17,000 images have no known copyright restrictions, and are available for any use.

Te Papa is New Zealand’s national museum, and its collections include art as well as history, natural history, and Maori and Pacific cultures. You can read more about this image initiative on Te Papa’s blog, or begin exploring the Collections Online.

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:

New Images Available in Artstor

Installation view of Splendors of China's Forbidden City, exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art, 2004-2005

Installation view of Splendors of China’s Forbidden City, exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art, 2004-2005

New images have recently been added to some existing collections in the Artstor Digital Library:

Getty Images for Free

Getty Images logoAfter years of filing lawsuits against those who used their photographs without permission, Getty Images (not to be confused with the the Getty Trust and the J. Paul Getty Museum) has made millions of its stock photos free to anyone who wants to use them for noncommercial purposes.

The one big catch: you have to use their “embed” tool to insert their pictures into your site, which may make them too cumbersome to use. Also note that Getty Images is not making all of its images free–just the rather generic stock photos. So, for example, journalists will still have to pay for the more specific images of current events to illustrate their news stories.

You can read more about this important change from Getty Images in places like Bloomberg Businessweek and CNET.

Wellcome Images

The Wellcome Library of the Wellcome Collection in London has made available over 100,000 free images through Wellcome Images. These images are being released under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, so you can feel free to use them for any purpose, as long as you credit their source (“Wellcome Library, London”).

Primarily a museum devoted to the history of medicine, the Wellcome Collection’s holdings include artworks by Rowlandson, Gillray, Cruikshank, Goya, Van Gogh, and Muybridge, among others. You can read more about Wellcome Images here.

New Collections in ARTstor

Ishtar Gate

Neo-Babylonian, Ishtar Gate, 604-562 BCE, Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin

Here is a year-end roundup of some of the notable recent additions to the ARTstor Digital Library:

Also, images from the University of Delaware Library are now featured in the Digital Public Library of America (DLPA).

ARTstor Workshop

ARTstor logoSusan Davi and I will be offering an introductory workshop on ARTstor on Tuesday, November 5, from 2:00 to 3:30 pm in 116A Morris Library. We will offer training and tips on how to find and download images, create image groups, and use the Offline Image Viewer (OIV) for classroom presentations. We will also discuss Shared Shelf, the new partnership between the University of Delaware and ARTstor to unite our digital image collections in one convenient and easy-to-use website.

All are welcome to attend, but seating is limited. Please click here to register for the workshop.

Image Group Download in ARTstor

ARTstor has announced a new feature: Image Group Download. This allows you to download Dowload Image Group Icongroups of up to 150 images at once, rather than one image at a time. It’s similar to ARTstor’s Export Image Group to Powerpoint feature, only this way the downloaded images don’t automatically go into a Powerpoint file. This can be a real timesaver, and it gives you more flexibility in how you use your images once they’re on your desktop. Note that you may use this new feature to download no more than 2000 images every 120 days.

ARTstor has posted a brief video here to get you started.