The following links present many helpful online visual art resources

1. Art Images for College Teaching (AICT)

AICT is a free-use image resource for the educational community. AICT is intended primarily to disseminate images of art and architectural works in the public domain on a free-access, free-use basis to all levels of the educational community, as well as to the public at large. All images displayed on this site have been photographed on location by the author, who consents to their use in any application that is both educational and non-profit in nature.

2. Artnet.com

Artnet.com provides access to art resources, research tools and magazines on-line and links to artists' web sites.

3. ARTstor

ARTstor is an American not-for-profit organisation; the money paid in subscriptions each year is fed back into the service. The organisation’s focus is on Art, Architecture and Archaeology and, particularly, American history and education. They have over 300,000 images in a series of collections, the largest of which is the Image Gallery with 180,000 images put together to provide a core of images for education use. More specialist collections include the Art History Survey Collection (4,200), The Carnegie “Arts of the US” collections (4200), Native American Art & Culture (12,000). Some of the ARTstor images are very high resolution and there is a range of tools to help the user, including zoom facilities.

4. Module Expressions: Images from the Microscope

Module Expressions is one of the Web's largest collections of colour photographs taken through an optical microscope (commonly referred to as "photo-micro-graphs"). The site contains galleries of images.

5. PictureAustralia – Australia

Using this site it is possible to search for people, places and events in the collections of libraries, museums, galleries, archives, universities and other cultural agencies, in Australia and abroad – all in the same search. The originals are viewed on the member’s web sites allowing them to retain management of their own images and metadata and 40 different institutions currently make their collections available. For the user this means they have a one-stop shop to collections.

PictureAustralia uses Dublin Core and the metadata is harvested every two months and stored by the National Library. An index is built from this metadata and it is this that users are searching when they access the service – the images themselves are retained by the member and retrieved only when searched for. Other benefits include the acceptance and use by all involved of Dublin Core standards and the Australian Pictorial thesaurus (although this is currently optional).

6. Prometheus – Germany

Education Based Model (University to University). Prometheus is described as a “distributed digital image archive for research and tuition”.12 A co-operative university project, initially funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research the aim is to provide the user with a single, unified interface linking into different image databases in the fields of history of art and archaeology, with images drawn from the slide libraries of the art history departments at the Universities. It is non-commercial but a licence fee is charged to cover the administration costs involved in running the image archive. Membership can be granted

Institutionally, for access through a campus network or a personal account and fees appear relatively low at 2000 per annum for a University. The site indicates that to date it has over 67 institutions participating and 14 databases.

7. The Aberdeen Bestiary

The Aberdeen Bestiary has been completely digitised by the University of Aberdeen. The manuscript, written and illuminated in England around 1200, is of added interest since it contains notes, sketches and other evidence of the way it was designed and executed. The digitised version, offering the display of full-page images and of detailed views of illustrations and other significant features, is complemented by a series of commentaries, and a transcription and translation of the original Latin. The Project was independently evaluated.

8. The Madison Digital Image Database

Developed at James Madison University, Harrisonburg this open-source content delivery system allows users to search, retrieve, organize and teach with digital images. Available as a free download the system appears to operate similar to a VLE (Virtual Learning Environment). Institutions which choose to download the software have to scan in their own images to build their own database. Currently approximately 39 US Universities have downloaded the system for use. It has been described by George Bent, associate professor of art history and chair of Washington and Lee University’s Department of Art as “a wonderful pedagogical tool. It’s changing the way we teach, reducing the prep time needed for lectures and it gives us extraordinary flexibility in the classroom”16 Washington and Lee are currently in the process of digitizing their collection of 100,000 colour slides and in 2002 Bent was the first academic in the Department of Art to teach exclusively with digital images. (The images are only available to W&L staff and students.)

9. TASI: Image Sites

The Technical Advisory Service for Images is a service that has been set up to provide advice and guidance to the Further and Higher Education community on the issues of creating, delivering and using digital images together with managing digitisation projects. TASI Image Sites - allows access to their collection of digital image resources.

10. The Web Gallery of Art – Hungary

Independent Model. Operating at the opposite end of the scale and based in Hungary, the Web Gallery of Art are, in their own words, “ a free resource of art history primarily for students and teachers. It is a private initiative not related to any museums or art institutions, and not supported financially by any state or corporate sponsors.” It is a searchable database of images from the 12th century to the mid-19th century and offers a subjective and eclectic mix of art images, artists and commentary. A sister site Fine Arts in Hungary (http://www.hung-art.hu/index-e.html) has since also been developed: Fine Arts in Hungary (5.100 images) is part of a larger project aiming to utilize the Internet technologies in public education, in schools and in research on the fields of fine arts. Web Gallery of Art (11.000 images) provides a European background by the comprehensive presentation of European painting and sculpture from the 12-18th centuries, while Szentendre Virtual Art Exhibition (1.800 images) explores the possibilities to present contemporary art. Istvan Szonyi and his Circle (250 images), and Mattis Teutsch and Der Blaue Reiter (450 images) aim to elaborate Internet tools for art historians and museum curators, while Landscapes by Thomas Ender (220 images) those for librarians.