Art History
Image Collections
ARTstor
Digital library of nearly 700,000 images in the areas of art, architecture, the humanities, and social sciences.
British Library
Many of the British Library's collections have been digitised and can be viewed here
British Museum
Collections can be explored online.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The Met has more than 375,000 hi-res images of public-domain works available for use.
National Gallery (London)
The National Gallery allow you to use their images for educational purposes.
National Gallery of Art (Washington)
Many images (not all) are open access and can be used without permission. Check each image.
VADS (the Visual Arts Data Service)
Visual art collections comprising over 100,000 images that are freely available and copyright cleared for use in learning, teaching and research in the UK.
Victoria & Albert Museum
Collections can be viewed online
Political Posters
Labadie Collection
The Joseph A. Labadie Collection contains posters which have been acquired over the past 100 years. This database consists of images of those posters covering social protest movements such as Anarchism, Civil Liberties, Colonialism, Communism, Ecology, Labor, Pacifism, Sexual Freedom, Socialism, Women, and Youth/Student Protest. Some are from the first half of the 20th century, but the majority are from the 1960s and later.
Cartoon Collections
Carl Giles Archive
The British Cartoon Archive is a library, archive and gallery dedicated to the history of British cartooning over the last two hundred years. Located at the University of Kent in Canterbury, it holds the national collection of cartoons of political and social comment published in British newspapers and magazines.
Punch Magazine Cartoon Archive
Punch magazine (1841-2002) produced half a million cartoons by the best artists on Domestic & Foreign Affairs, Culture, Art, Fashion, Society, Science & Technology. Images are watermarked but you have access in the library to paper copies of the magazine that can be photographed or scanned.
Sound Collections
British Library Archival Sound Recordings
World wide collection of recorded sound from music, drama and literature, to oral history and wildlife sounds. Formats range from cylinders made in the late 19th century to the latest digital media.
Moving Image Collections
Box of Broadcasts (BoB)
BoB is a shared online off-air TV and radio recording service for UK higher and further education institutions.
BBC Rewind
BBC Archive footage from around the UK, from the late 1940s to 2021.