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Finding Subject-Specific Digital Media Resources

There are a multitude of websites providing access to a wide range of digital media resources (images, video and audio) covering many subject areas. This can be very bewildering if you are searching for specific resources to use in the lecture/classroom or for inclusion in a VLE (virtual learning environment). The purpose of this document is to provide a subject-specific guide to finding digital media resources with links to a number of useful websites.

Introduction

You should read this document in conjunction with our Finding Video, Audio and Images Online which gives a useful overview of tools and strategies for finding digital resources, and highlights some of the general sources you can use.

We have divided the guide into the following categories: art and architecture; news and current events; history; maps; and science, technology and medicine.

This is not an exhaustive list. The links to these sites were checked to be correct in March 2010. You are reminded that websites are subject to change and that even though we check the links regularly, we cannot guarantee all the links will be available at any particular time. Please let us know if you find a broken link. We may also add new sites to the list during the checking process.

Before using any digital media resources in your own work, make sure you have the appropriate copyright clearances. See our Copyright: An Overview and related advice.

Links are listed alphabetically and have been arranged as follows:

  1. Art and architecture
  2. News and current events
  3. History
  4. Maps
  5. Science, technology and medicine
  6. Miscellaneous
  7. Related information

1. Art and architecture

These days even the smallest museums and art galleries have some kind of online presence.

If you are looking for artworks - whether reproductions of historical or contemporary artworks or works created directly for digital display - there are thousands of sites to choose from. If it's something specific you're after it will always be easier if you know in advance who owns the original so you can go straight to their site.

That said, if the work is out of copyright (or not!) you will often find amateur reproductions in personal online collections. Be aware that these will usually have been photographed within the galleries (without a tripod or proper lighting) or scanned from published art books (often infringing copyright in the process).

The sites listed here are a mix of high profile collections, personal web galleries and links to other useful resources. Many galleries and art museums also make their works available to larger aggregated collections for commercial or educational purposes - these are listed too.

1.1 Museums, galleries and collections

  • ARTstor - non-profit digital image library for education - includes works from over 150 collections (institutional subscription required)
  • Bridgeman Education - educational collection of of fine art, cultural and historical images (institutional subscription required). See also the commercial image site Bridgeman Art Library
  • British Museum - the museum's website includes digitised highlights of its vast collection. See also its commercial image site British Museum Images
  • CAMIO - OCLC's Catalog of Art Museum Images Online. Works of art from various major North American collections (institutional subscription/Athens login required)
  • Art and Architecture - collection of images from the Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery and the Conway Library - see also Courtauld Images
  • Europeana - portal with links to over 6 million images, text, video and sounds from European museums, libraries, archives and audio-visual collections. Currently in beta, version 1 will launch in 2010
  • Great Buildings Online - large collection of photos, architectural plans, 3D models and maps
  • Live Art Archives - part of the University of Bristol's Theatre Collection
  • Louvre - browse selected works or search the Paris museum's online databases
  • Metropolitan Museum of Art - search approx 150,000 works from the New York museum's permanent collection
  • Museum of Modern Art - search or browse the New York museum's online collection of over 30,000 works. Multimedia section includes audio, video and interactive exhibitions
  • The National Gallery - the London gallery's entire collection is available to search or browse. See also the Research section for access to other online collections
  • National Gallery of Art - search or browse the Washington gallery's collection. Audio and video podcasts are also available
  • Netherlands Media Arts Institute (NIMk) - extensive collection of video and media art available for online viewing for educational purposes
  • OAIster/WorldCat - over 23 million records, many of them digital media resources
  • Resonance FM - 'radio art' station of programmes made by musicians, artists and critics representing London's arts scenes. Many shows are available as podcasts
  • RIBApix - images from the collections of the British Architectural Library at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA)
  • Scholars Resource - search or browse over 100,000 images from various museums (institutional site licence required)
  • Scran - 360,000 images, movies and sounds from museums, galleries, archives and the media (subscription required)
  • The State Hermitage Museum - includes a digital collection of the St Petersburg museum's artworks - try the QBIC (Query By Image Content) colour or layout search
  • Tate - search or browse the online collection which includes illustrated information for the majority of works from Tate Britain, Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives
  • VADS - a selection of visual art collections comprising over 100,000 images freely available and copyright cleared for use in learning, teaching and research in the UK
  • UbuWeb - independent resource of avant-garde video and audio art made available for noncommercial and educational use
  • Victoria and Albert Museum - search over 1 million works from the London V&A collections
  • Visual Collections - dozens of digital image collections from museums, universities and private collections throughout the world. Uses a proprietary browser plugin which may not work by default in some browsers
  • The Whitworth Art Gallery - browse selected highlights from the University of Manchester gallery

1.2 Art history and other art and architecture resources

  • Architecture Centre Network Links - links to a wide variety of architectural organisations and resources
  • Artcyclopedia - links to countless art sites and resources
  • Art Guide - guide to UK art collections, can be browsed by collection, location, artist and provides info on current exhibitions
  • Art History Resources on the Web - huge personal directory of art history resources
  • Art Images for College Teaching - personal collection of images of art and architectural works in the public domain
  • Artnet - aimed at art buyers and sellers, the site lets you browse the works of thousands of contemporary artists and galleries from around the world
  • AskArt - provides information (images, biographical info, auction prices) about artists
  • Baltic Podcasts - monthly audio and video podcasts with artists and curators exploring exhibitions and projects at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art
  • Cornucopia - information about more than 6,000 collections in the UK's museums, galleries, archives and libraries
  • Culture24 - reviews, links, listings and education resources from thousands of UK museums, galleries, archives and libraries
  • Encyclopedia Smithsonian: Art and Design - the Smithsonian Institution's A-Z of art and design
  • Intute - Visual Arts - evaluates thousands of sites to provide a directory of subject-specific web resources for study and research
  • Luxonline - a web resource for exploring British film and video art
  • Saatchi Gallery Art Musuem Links - information about art museums around the world including collection highlights
  • UCLA Arts Library: Art and Art History - selected Internet resources
  • VernissageTV - video documentaries about artists and the art world
  • VideoArt.net - video art, short films, video installations and interviews
  • Video Data Bank - distributor of video art, interviews and documentaries. Short clips available online, full tapes available for rental or purchase
  • Web Gallery of Art - virtual museum and searchable database of European painting and sculpture

2. News and current events

If you are looking for topical material from current or recent news events, the web can provide you with up-to-the-minute resources - if not live, then seconds after they are produced.

The major search engines all let you search specifically for news, or filter results for latest updates or recently added pages. Try Google News, Yahoo News, or Bing News. Each of them compiles news stories, images and/or videos from hundreds of global news sources. At the time of writing, Google and Yahoo let you further refine results to news images, while Bing filters for news videos.

News search engines are really useful if you want a quick overview, but it's often more useful to go directly to dedicated news sources - these are the news agencies, newspaper and media sites that provide the search engines with their results. We won't list every newspaper site here - you can find a good list at Nettizen Online Newspaper Directory - but you will find links to news agencies and some of the big commercial picture libraries that now provide news images and video.

  • AFP - news photos, graphics and video from international news agency Agence France-Presse
  • AP Images - current and historical news images and video from international news agency The Associated Press
  • Corbis Images - Corbis is one of the big names in the commercial image industry and supplies current events images. Corbis Motion has archival news footage.
  • Education Image Gallery (EIG) - over 50,000 images from the Getty Images collection cleared for use in education - mostly archival images, but some current events (institutional subscription required)
  • Getty Images - the other big commercial picture library which supplies news images and current events footage
  • Press Association - news photos and videos from national news agency of UK and Ireland
  • Reuters - international news agency with current events images and video

You may also be interested in media resources created by non-professionals - often referred to as 'user-generated content'. Photo sharing sites like Flickr and video sites such as Vimeo and YouTube are bombarded with thousands of new files every minute.

While a lot of this material will be irrelevant or inappropriate, you will find that the rise in video and camera phones means members of the public are often 'on the scene' just as a news story is breaking and before the news agencies know about it. The quality of material produced by 'citizen journalists' is often questionable, but sometimes immediacy is more important than whether it is well-composed or completely in focus. See Using Blogs to Find and Organise Images for more on this.

An article in the March 2010 issue of the British Journal of Photography - now also available online - looks at how news agencies themselves search such sites for 'eyewitness content', and examines the procedures they use make sure the images are authentic.

Some phones have basic voice recorders which all sorts of people (including professional journalists) are now using to record audio 'in the field'. These recordings can be uploaded easily for immediate distribution via audio blogging services such as AudioBoo. You can find more information about this in our Using a Mobile Phone as an Audio Recorder advice document.

In order to find the resources you need amongst the mountains of irrelevant content, you'll need use the right search terms or use RSS feeds to subscribe to specific keywords and/or updates from particular users. See also our accompanying advice document Finding Video, Audio and Images Online which has some useful tips on keeping up to date with new content via automatic alerts and subscribing to RSS feeds.

3. History

The best places to begin a search for historic material are archives, library special collections and museums. Many of them now have significant online collections.

A number of museums are already listed above in the Art and architecture section, but these are worth mentioning again here:

  • Cornucopia - information about more than 6,000 collections in the UK’s museums, galleries, archives and libraries
  • Culture24 - reviews, links, listings and education resources from thousands of UK museums, galleries, archives and libraries
  • Europeana - portal with links to over 6 million images, text, video and sounds from European museums, libraries, archives and audio-visual collections. Currently in beta, version 1 will launch in 2010

See also the News and current events section above, as many of the news agencies have historical news collections.

The following are directories of archives and will help you locate relevant collections and items - you will have to visit each archive's website to see if they have digitised the material you want:

  • Archives Hub - national gateway to over 20,000 descriptions of archives held in around 190 repositories in UK universities and colleges.
  • The National Archives Access to Archives (A2A) - contains details of the holdings of around 400 archives of local record offices, libraries, universities, museums and national and specialist institutions across England and Wales. Records date from the eighth century to the present day
  • UNESCO Archives Portal - international gateway to information for archivists and archives users

If you are looking for libraries, Libweb lists over 8,000 library sites from around the world - the Great Britain and Ireland section lists public libraries as well as university and research libraries. You could also use the University of Wolverhampton's UK Active Map of Universities and HE Institutions to browse geographically, or try this personal collection of links to UK Public Libraries.

Other useful history sites include:

4. Maps

The web is a good source for maps, although they vary considerably in range and quality.

The interactive maps such as those provided by search engines Google, Ask, Microsoft Bing and Yahoo, vary not only in terms of features offered, but also in the detail they provide at 'street level'. You may find that one service is better at zooming in on one part of the world, while another delivers more detail in other locations.

We have provided a number of links, but if you don't find what you are looking for here you can find good sets of links at the Bodleian Library Map Room, the Harvard College Library - Cartography and GIS Links and the University of Texas Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection.

4.1 Current maps

  • AA Route Planner - UK and Europe routes, maps and directions using Google Maps
  • Ask Maps - interactive world map and directions with satellite and bird's eye views
  • Bing Maps - Microsoft's interactive world map with satellite, 3D and bird's eye views
  • CIA Reference Maps - static continental maps downloadable as PDFs
  • Digimap (plus Historical Digimap, Geology Digimap and Marine Digimap) - Ordnance Survey maps and spatial data of Great Britain for use within UK HE and FE (institutional subscription required)
  • Google Earth - free-to-download software with virtual tours through 3D maps of the world - including ocean floors, outer space, terrain and 3D buildings
  • Google Maps - interactive world map with directions, satellite and street level views
  • MapQuest - AOL's interactive world map with directions and satellite view
  • National Geographic - interactive world map, street and satellite maps. Also zoomable versions of National Geographic print maps
  • OpenStreetMap - free wiki map of the whole world, editable by registered users
  • Ordnance Survey - create personal paper maps or license digital map data from Great Britain's official national mapping agency
  • Ordnance Survey Get-a-Map - search for UK maps up to 1:25 000 scale
  • OS OpenSpace API - lets developers create web applications and online projects with Ordnance Survey maps
  • Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection - huge collection of static maps from around the world, with links to online maps of current interest
  • Streetmap - maps and directions for Great Britain's streets and roads
  • Yahoo Maps - interactive world map and directions with satellite view

4.2 Historic maps

  • American Memory: Maps - Library of Congress collections of historic maps
  • David Rumsey Map Collection - this collection focuses on rare 18th and 19th Century North American and South American maps and other cartographic materials. Various interactive viewers are offered
  • Genmaps - images of English, Welsh and Scottish maps from their beginnings to the early 20th Century
  • Historic Digimap - historic maps of Great Britain from Landmark for use within UK HE and FE (institutional subscription required)
  • Images of Early Maps on the Web - directory of links to a huge number of map sites
  • Old Maps - old maps of England, Scotland and Wales from Ordnance Survey's County Series
  • Perry-Castañeda Library Historic Map Collection - huge collection of historic maps from around the world and links to other historic map sites
  • Vision of Britain - topographical, land use and administrative maps from the 19th and 20th Centuries. Interactive layered map allows you to switch between four different maps of the same location

If you want to generate your own maps, there are several tools available online that will help you do so, including: DEMIS World Map Server; Online Map Creation Tool; Integrated CEOS European Data Server; Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative; National Historical Geographic Information System; Open Source GIS; Planiglobe.

Mapping need not be limited to geographical, topographical or political features - there are many other kinds of maps online. Examples are the Earthweek maps which are updated every week with information about natural and man-made events, and the Atlas of Cyberspace - visual maps of the Internet itself (the site is no longer being updated but still includes images of cybermaps and links to similar resources).

5. Science, technology and medicine

5.1 Intute directories

A good place to start looking for science and medicine resources are the Intute directories. They highlight the best web resources for study and research and have been hand-picked by a national team of subject specialists from universities across the UK:

Another good directory is the from the Library of Congress:

5.2 Free-to-use US government media resources

Some of the biggest and best collections of scientific resources on the web are available from the various federal agencies of the United States. US government media resources are generally in the public domain and free from copyright, but it's always wise to check the terms and conditions on each site you visit.

5.3 General science and nature

  • Science and Society Picture Library - commercial picture library with around 50,000 images from the Science Museum, the National Media Museum, the National Railway Museum and other collections
  • ScienceImage - Australian image and footage library specialising in science and nature
  • Science Photo Library - commercial picture library providing rights-managed and royalty-free images and footage

5.4 Earth sciences

5.5 Life sciences

  • Agripicture Images - agricultural stock library of farming and countryside images
  • ARKive - centralised digital library of films and photographs of the world's species, prioritising those species at most risk of extinction
  • Biology Image Library - biology and biomedicine images, movies, illustrations and animations (Institutional subscription required for full access)
  • Botanical Society of America - Plant Images and Photos - BSA's online collection of historical slides and member contributions
  • ePIC Electronic Plant Information Centre - Kew Gardens - provides a single point of search across all Kew's major specimen, bibliographic and taxonomic databases, with plans to add digital images and electronic documents
  • FLPA - commercial rights-managed and royalty-free wildlife and nature picture library
  • HEA BioScience Image Bank - freely available bioscience images contributed by academics, researchers, Learned Societies, industry and individuals with rights cleared for educational purposes
  • WWF Multimedia Galleries - video, audio, podcasts and photos on or about the environment

5.6 Medicine

6. Miscellaneous

7. Related information

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