Visual and Material Culture Subject Guide: Web Sources

Artstor’s ever-growing Public Collections offer approximately 1.3 million freely accessible images, videos, documents, and audio files from library special collections, faculty research, and institutional history materials, as well as hundreds of thousands of open access images from partner museums. Anyone may view and download these collections; no subscription or login required.
NOTE: Mount Allison does not currently have a subscription to the paid content in Artstor; only the public collections are available.

Collaboration among some of the world’s most acclaimed art museums enables viewing of more than a thousand artworks online in extraordinary detail. Explore museums from around the world, and create your own collection of masterpieces.

This site serves as a comprehensive index to the online exhibits of thousands of artists. Search by artist's name, artwork title, or museum, or use the browse lists. Entries include links to museum sites, image archives, and other online resources.

This archive and research center retains the archives of significant 20th-century photographers and provides digital images of many works from the collections.

The CIAC is a non-profit organisation with a mandate to disseminate contemporary art from Québec, Canada and abroad.

Explore millions of items from libraries, museums, and archives. Project partners include Internet Archive, HathiTrust. U.S. Library of Congress and National Archives, New York Public Library, Smithsonian Institution, and others.

Includes photos and digitized access to artworks held by the Smithsonian, including painting, sculpture, photography, and more.

The NGA houses one of the finest collections in the world illustrating major achievements in painting, sculpture, and graphic arts from the Middle Ages to the present. Search the collection by specific artist, title, or a combination of criteria, or browse by medium and school.

Ottawa's showcase features Canadian exhibitions, collections, educational programs and other museum services. Click on Research to explore archival records, collection databases, and other tools.

This online collection makes available a portion of the close to one million images from Life Magazine and other sources documenting American life and events in the 20th century.

This resource for artists and art students focuses on the technical fundamentals of perspective, shading, colour and painting; compiled by Ralph Larmann, art faculty member at the University of Evansville, in Indiana.

Recommended Reads for Visual Literacy is a bibliography of articles, books, and archival materials that seeks to serve as a detailed web resource for visual literacy. This project seeks to empower the current research community and to encourage educators and scholars to explore the existing literature on visual literacy. The project focuses on three main areas: visual literacy, libraries, and the ACRL Visual Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education; visual literacy across the disciplines; and archival materials about the formation of the International Visual Literacy Association. For more information about the archival materials, please see the Arizona State University’s website about the Benedict Visual Literacy Collection.

Developed by the Association of College & Research Libraries, this guide outlines seven core competencies for visual literacy. Visual literacy is a set of abilities that enables an individual to effectively find, interpret, evaluate, use, and create images and visual media. Visual literacy skills equip a learner to understand and analyze the contextual, cultural, ethical, aesthetic, intellectual, and technical components involved in the production and use of visual materials. A visually literate individual is both a critical consumer of visual media and a competent contributor to a body of shared knowledge and culture.