Researching Objects in the Spencer Museum of Art: Finding Images

Search the Spencer Museum Collection, The index allows searches for artists, exhibitions, and events. The “keyword” feature lets you search the collection for objects related by themes or subjects. The database has been designed with ease of navigation in mind, with fully relational features. For instance, if you search for the artist Thomas Hart Benton, you’ll find all of his works in our collection, and the history of those works in exhibitions, publications, multimedia, and related events. You can compile the results of a search into a “portfolio” and view side by side using the lightbox feature.

Image Gateway, Included here are licensed commercial sources, publicly available collections, and images digitized from resources in the KU libraries, museums, and academic departments. Information and terms of use for each collection is found in the listing.

ARTstor Help & Tutorial, One of the most comprehensive image resources licensed by KU is ARTstor with more than 1 million images on a wide-range of topics. This guide introduces the resource and helps users learn to find, download, save, print, organize, and share images

Images may be found in a variety of formats on publicly accessible web sites. Copyright restrictions may apply to these images, and the web master of a given site may need to be consulted when images are used.  Many large and small museums have excellent web sites which display images from their collections as well as information about the images and contacts for more assistance. The library also has many lavishly illustrated books and journals that are available for research.

Finding Images on the Web A tutorial prepared at Boston Univ. that provides an excellent introduction for image searching.

Art Resource A large commercial photo archive of fine art from prehistoric times to the present. Includes over three million transparencies and black and white photographs of works cross-referenced by subject, title, artist, period, place, and medium. 

Bridgeman Art Library A commercial vendor founded in 1972 offering art, culture, and history images from over 8,000 collections; more than 55,000 entries and 46,497 images from over 29,000 artists. 

Digital Imaging Project Art Historical Images of Sculpture and Architecture from Pre-Historic to Post-Modern that can be searched by location or by artist's name. More than 17,000 images posted by Mary Ann Sullivan of Bluffton University. 

Oxford Art Online Gateway access to Grove Art Online and other Oxford art reference resources. In addition to the more than 23,000 subject entries and 21,000 biographies, the product offers 40,000 image links and 5,000 images contained within Grove Art Online. 

Image Collections and Online Art Directory of image websites compiled by Pat Young at the University of Michigan.

Artists Rights Society. The preeminent copyright, licensing, and monitoring organization for visual artists in the United States. Founded in 1987, ARS represents the intellectual property rights interests of over 50,000 visual artists and estates of visual artists from around the world (painters, sculptors, photographers, architects and others).

Copyright Crash Course. A website prepared by Georgia Harper, Office of General Counsel at the University of Texas, outlining some of the legal issues regarding copyright and fair use.