As an established art history department at a liberal arts institution, it is vital that you have easy access to visual resources for teaching. Below, you will find a bibliography to start your search for images; this one in particular highlights Islamic art, since it is one of the strengths of our department. Should you find these resources insufficient, please feel free to consult me further regarding other websites, purchasing images from vendors, scanning slides, or scanning images from publications. Thank you and good luck!
Visual Resources Curator
1. ArtStor. http://www.artstor.org/index.shtml
Our institution currently subscribes to ArtStor, a non-profit digital image database with a collection of over one million images. Thousands of these images are uploaded by institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, who encourage their use in educational enviornments. ArtStor offers both keyword and advanced searches similar to that of a library catalog and also fosters easy browsing through geography and classification lists, as well as "featured groups," including one on Islamic Art and others on interdisciplinary topics. If you cannot find images that you're looking for in ArtStor, we would be happy to scan them from publications, catalog them, and upload them to the site via their Shared Shelf tool. ArtStor also offers the organizational feature of saving personalized image groups, with the ability to export them to slideshows.
2. ArchNet https://archnet.org/lobby/
Hosted by MIT, ArchNet describes itself as "an international online community for architects, planners, urban designers, landscape architects, conservationists, and scholars, with a focus on Muslim cultures and civilisations." It offers a free membership and, similar to ArtStor, it breaks down images into helpful categories with more of an architectural focus, offering categories such as building type, building style, and building usage. ArchNet also gives users the ability to save personal groups of images. In addition, it hosts a number of digitized scholarly articles and other publications (downloadable for free) which complement their image collection. This project is supported by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture.
3. Europeana http://www.europeana.eu/
Europeana is a collaboration between European museums, galleries, and archives, and offers library catalog-like searching and browsability. One particularly helpful aspect of Europeana is its usage of linked data in fields, which can be helpful in very specific browsing. With content uploaded directly from the institutions, this site offers generally thorough metadata, often including a curatorial description of an object.
4. Ancient World Image Bank http://www.flickr.com/photos/isawnyu
This resource, supported by the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World is free, available via a flickr account. All images can be used freely with proper citation. Although it mostly focuses on Egyptian sites, it also contains a number of images of Palestine and other disputed areas, as well as sites of ancient Islamic occupation.
5. Saudi Aramco World http://photoarchive.saudiaramcoworld.com/
This site offers over 40,000 images of the Middle East and other Islamic cultures. Featuring images not only of art and architecture, this site also focuses on other aspects of Islamic culture, including every-day life, in order to convey that culture through images. Most of the images on this site were photographed for the magazine Aramco World, although many are unpublished. Tis site offers a free membership.
6. Individual Museum websites. Many museums with strong Islamic collections also have strong databases. While some images are available for free, many museums will small a charge fee to sell you a high resolution image. A few museums include:
The British Museum http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/search.aspx
LACMA http://www.lacma.org/islamic_art/intro.htm
The Metropolitan Museum http://www.metmuseum.org/
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