Art
Digital Art Libraries
Library and Museum Art Collections
Art Institute of Chicago
Digitized access to a percentage of the art collection at the Art Institute of Chicago including fine art, photography, sculpture, and fashion.
https://www.artic.edu/collection
https://www.artic.edu/visit-us-virtually
Contributed by Ananya Madiraju
Artcyclopedia: Directory of Art Museums in the United States
Use this directory to find art museums in the United States. You can also expand the search into a global list of museums and galleries.
The British Library
The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and the largest library in the world by number of items cataloged. Over 200 million items from many countries in over 30 subject areas.
The J. Paul Getty Museum Collection
The J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center in Los Angeles houses European paintings, drawings, sculpture, illuminated manuscripts, decorative arts, and photography from its beginnings to the present, gathered internationally. Their digital collection, although not the entirety, is quite extensive.
https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/
Due to closures during the COVID-19 pandemic, the museum has created Getty at Home - resources, educational programming, videos, art history lessons, and other resources.
https://www.getty.edu/education/kids_families/do_at_home/index.html
Contributed by: Lisa Nena
HathiTrust Digital Library
This collection contains 18+million digitized items. The collection includes magazines and other digitized resources.
https://www.hathitrust.org/
Library of Congress
This collection is a holding of a few hundred subcollections accessible from the Library of Congress. The collections consist of materials in a variety of formats and across over 60 subjects.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Digital access to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's collection. The collection includes modern, contemporary, Asian, Greek, and Roman art among other collections in mediums such as sculpture, painting, and photography.
Louvre Museum
Over 482,000 documents, or three quarters of its archive, have been digitized and made available for free to the general public. Guests can explore Furniture, Sculptures, Paintings, Textiles and more.
Manchester Art Gallery
The Manchester Art Gallery's digital collection contains over 46,000 objects of fine art, decorative art, and costume, and is searchable and browsable.
McCord Stewart Museum
The McCord Stewart Museum's open access online collection contains more than 154,000 objects, photographs, and archival documents, as well as 144,000 royalty free images.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Librarians and interns at the Thomas J. Watson Library have digitized over 250 early Museum Publications. It is the largest art museum in the United States.
360° Tour:
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/online-features/met-360-project
Contributed by Solia Martinez-Jacobs, & Aimee Ward
MOMA: The Museum of Modern Art
Digital access to the Museum of Modern Art's collection containing over 90,000 pieces online from around the world within a span of 150 years. The collection includes painting, sculpture, printmaking, drawing, photography, architecture, design and film.
https://www.moma.org/collection/
Contributed by Lisa Nena
The Morgan Library and Museum
The Morgan's online collection provides access to highlights of their extensive holdings, including nearly 500 Rembrandt etchings, 10,000 images in their Drawings Online collection, and hundreds of digitized music manuscripts as well as other manuscripts, books, and sketchbooks.
https://www.themorgan.org/collection
Contributed by Heather Harrison
National Portrait Gallery
The National Portrait Gallery has the most extensive collection of portraits in the world, and their searchable and browsable online collection contains more than 220,000 works from the 8th century to today. It contains portrait paintings, drawings, miniatures, sculptures, photographs and negatives, prints, drawings, silhouettes, and caricatures.
https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/explore/by-period/
National Gallery of Art
The National Gallery of Art provides open access to over 50,000 downloadable images from their collection. The entire collection consists of over 150,000 sculptures, prints, drawings, and paintings.
https://www.nga.gov/open-access-images.html
Contributed by Heather Harrison
New York Public Library
The New York Public Library's digital collections contains more than 867,000 items with new materials added every day. It contains prints, photographs, maps, manuscripts, streaming video, and more. It is searchable and browsable.
https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/
Smithsonian
The Smithsonian’s Open Access platform includes more than 3 million 2D and 3D digital images and other data from the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.
University of Washington: University Libraries
The University of Washington University Libraries' digital collections contains photographs, maps, newspapers, posters. reports, and other media, and their collections emphasize rare and unique materials. Users can search, sort by subject, sort alphabetically, and browse.
https://content.lib.washington.edu/
The Victoria & Albert Museum
The Victoria & Albert museum has a collection of over 1.2 million objects from all over the world featuring clothing, ancient ceramics, paintings, sculpture, and an almost limitless amount of other fine art objects.
https://www.vam.ac.uk/collections?type=featured
Contributed by Lisa Nena
Online Only Art Collections
Google Arts & Culture
Explore museums of many kinds, discover new artwork and experiment with virtual & augmented reality.
https://artsandculture.google.com/
For example: Tour the Van Gogh Museum:
https://artsandculture.google.com/partner/van-gogh-museum?hl=en
Another example: Tour the Musée d’Orsay, Paris:
https://artsandculture.google.com/partner/musee-dorsay-paris?hl=en
Contributed by Solia Martinez-Jacobs, & Aimee WardSpecial Focus Museums
California African American Museum (CAAM)
The California African American Museum (CAAM) conserves more than 6,300 objects of art, historical artifacts, and memorabilia, and maintains a research library with more than 20,000 books and other reference materials available for limited public use.
Contributed by Angelina ZubkovJapanese American National Museum
The Japanese American National Museum covers more than 130 years of Japanese-American history and contains artifacts, home movies, textiles, art, photographs, and oral histories.
Contributed by Angelina ZubkovMuseum of Latin American Art (MOLAA)
The Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) is the only museum in the United States dedicated to modern and contemporary Latin American and Latino art. Its permanent collection numbers over 1,300 works of art.
Contributed by Angelina ZubkovNational Museum of Women in the Arts
The National Museum of Women in the arts has an extensive online collection of over 200 works of art by women, along with artist pages with detailed information about their life and work.
https://nmwa.org/nmwa-at-home/
Contributed by Heather HarrisonFilm/Moving Images Collections
Chicago Film Archives
Chicago Film Archives contains historical footage found nowhere else.
https://chicagofilmarchives.org/collections/
Contributed by Heather HarrisonHarvard Film Archive
Harvard Film Archive has one of the largest university-based film collections in the United States. A selection of the over 40,000 audio visual collection is accessible online.
https://harvardfilmarchive.org/collections
Contributed by Heather HarrisonTexas Archive of the Moving Image
Archive of Texas-related audio visual items including home video, amateur films, advertisements, local television, and more.
https://texasarchive.org/https://texasarchive.org/
Contributed by Heather Harrison