In recent years, many great art museums have decided to open up their collections, putting online huge troves of images that showcase the masterpieces hanging on their walls. They’ve also made available free art catalogues and books, letting you learn all about important artists and styles of painting. Now, university presses and libraries are starting to follow suit, giving readers free access to books from their archives. We’ve tried to keep you posted on these cultural developments here on Open Culture. But you’ve likely missed a great resource or two. To make sure you stay up to speed, we offer a roundup below:
Art Books
- Download 395 Art Catalogs from The Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Free: The Guggenheim Puts 99 Modern Art Books Online
- Download Over 250 Free Art Books From the Getty Museum
Art Images
- The British Library Puts 1,000,000 Images into the Public Domain, Making Them Free to Reuse & Remix
- 40,000 Artworks from 250 Museums, Now Viewable for Free at Google Art Project
- The Rijksmuseum Puts 125,000 Dutch Masterpieces Online, and Lets You Remix Its Art
- The National Gallery Makes 25,000 Images of Artwork Freely Available Online
- LA County Museum Makes 20,000 Artistic Images Available for Free Download
- The Getty Puts 4600 Art Images Into the Public Domain
- New Robert Rauschenberg Digital Collection Lets You Download Free High-Res Images of the Artist’s Work
- Download 100,000+ Images From The History of Medicine, All Free Courtesy of The Wellcome Library
University Presses
- Read 700 Free eBooks Made Available by the University of California Press
- A New Free eBook Every Month from the University of Chicago Press
If we’re missing any great collection, please let us know in the comments section below. We’re always love to discover a new storehouse of free knowledge. And we’ll make sure that readers learn about them.
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On our website OpenGLAM (GLAM=Galleries, Libraries, Archives & Museums) we keep track of Open Collections. Here you can find the above and quite few more. Thanks for raising awareness! http://openglam.org/open-collections/
Regarding University Presses: don’t forget the Canadian content! The Athabasca University Press offers all of their publications as free PDFs online. There is a lot of amazing work on the history of First Nations peoples and the Canadian West as a whole, including some transnational work with the American West: http://www.aupress.ca/
My personal favourite is Sarah Carter’s The Importance of Being Monogamous: Marriage and Nation-Building in Western Canada to 1915: http://www.aupress.ca/index.php/books/120144
Thanks for the post, didn’t know about those art catalogues, wonderful!
You can also find a whole host of free (and openly licensed!) material through the Sources section of The Public Domain Review: http://publicdomainreview.org/sources/
Thank you for this valuable information for anyone who wants to research art images and see museum collections. It is a digital library. SACI is glad to share your post with our students who will find it very useful.
Wow, what a great way to keep the mind active! Especially this winter. I am off to explore the links.
2009, WHITNEY MUSEUM IN NEW YORK, 196???7, OR 1972??? THE SUMMER OF LOVE, SANTANNA ARTE Y MUSICA,
INCLUDED “A SMALL PLEXICLASS ROOM OF FIGURATIVE ARTS”
Hi folks,
We provide an easy to use portal of over 5M images from GLAM (galleries, museums, archives and museums) at http://www.pastpin.com.
Feel free to check us out!
Thanks,
Neil
I am looking for a book Texas Confederate Calvary Volume 1 and 2 by Arthur Wyllie. I need to know if you have these books, how much and if ya’ll don’t have these book, were can I find them?
Thank you
Mr. Rawls