Freely Available and Open Access Resources

Online search platform with access to digitized art history texts in the public domain (including art, architecture, material culture, and related fields).

Thousands of visual arts images, including fashion, design, prints, and sculpture.

From the Library of Congress, including many photographs and other visual elements documenting American history.

Explore collections from around the world using tools created by the Google Cultural Institute

Browse open and free content made available through JSTOR and Artstor.

PCAD contains information regarding the buildings and designers of California, Oregon, and Washington. Related professionals such as landscape architects, interior designer, developers, and building contractors and their work are also included. Building records contain information about their creators (when possible) and includes historical and geographic information in addition to images when available.

SAH Archipedia is an authoritative online encyclopedia of the U.S. built environment organized by the Society of Architectural Historians and the University of Virginia Press. It contains histories, photographs, and maps for over 20,000 structures and places. These are mostly buildings, but as you explore SAH Archipedia you will also find landscapes, infrastructure, monuments, artwork, and more. This cross-section of the country demonstrates the richness and diversity of architecture and building practice across many centuries, from mud brick to steel, from ancient cliff dwellings to contemporary office towers—a history that unfolds in individual building entries and thematic essays written by leading architectural historians who survey and explain styles and typologies, materials and techniques, and social and political contexts, from local to state to national levels.

An open resource focusing on the built environments of Muslim societies.

Art21 provides unparalleled access to the artist’s voice to diverse audiences around the world, using the power of digital media to introduce millions of people to contemporary art and artists.

Published by the Getty Research Institute of the J. Paul Getty Trust and the French Institut de l'Information Scientifique et Technique du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (INIST-CNRS), BHA is the most comprehensive art bibliography available worldwide, covering European and American visual arts from late antiquity to 2009.

The Getty Publications Virtual Library contains more than 250 titles spanning its forty-year publishing history. Titles are searchable by title, author, and keyword and include full descriptions, tables of contents, links to read online, to purchase the print book, to find in a library, or to download the complete PDF for free for personal use.

Weekly videos on art, literature, architecture, design, music produced by Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.

MetPublications is a portal to The Met's comprehensive publishing program with over 1,500 titles, including books, online publications, and Bulletins and Journals from the last five decades.

American vernacular songs and stories from the Library of Congress collections.

An interactive website that allows users to listen to and learn about more than 6,000 songs from 1,000 cultures — including many from Alan Lomax’s personal collection. The website is organized by map and by culture. The samples were digitized from hard copies at the Library of Congress and include 1978 field recordings from the Kullu culture in Himachal Pradesh, India; harvest songs from 1954 Romania; and a ballad to John Henry from Asheville, N.C., in 1941, recorded by Lomax.

Unique sound recordings, including oral histories, music, drama, literature.

(Vanderbilt University. Wilson Music Library) A multi-media reference archive and resource center for traditional and popular song, music, and dance of Africa and the Americas.

(UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive) American folk music, stories, and and field recordings.

Freely available online portal, featuring millions of pages of books and magazines from the histories of film, broadcasting, and recorded sound.

From the Academy, this series of collections includes personal papers, the Academy Awards collection, photographs, periodicals, sheet music, and more.

Features information on silent-era producers, directors, co-directors, scenario writers, scenario editors, camera operators, title writers, editors, costume designers, and exhibitors. From Columbia University.

Project from the University of Michigan: "a growing library of three-minute streaming videos, each of which features a different expert recruited from cinema and media studies faculty across the world explaining a specific critical media studies term and illustrating how it can be applied to analyze selected film, television, and media examples."

Using the YouTube platform, this channel presents hundreds of oral history interviews with major figures in television history. See also the main Archive of American Television site.

Curated by Maya Cade, Black Film Archive lists every Black film made between 1915 and 1979 that is currently streaming with descriptions and contextual information.

Includes KTLA news footage documenting local history, the LGBTQIA series In the Life, selected L.A. Rebellion and UCLA student films, and more.

Oral histories from the Off-Broadway theatre company Primary Stages.

Digital project from NYU Libraries and NYU's Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics that "provides a digital venue for documenting the expression of social and political life through performance."

Free site with production credits and basic information on specific Broadway theatrical productions.

Thirty centuries of historic and contemporary design.

Located in London, the world's leading museum devoted to contemporary design in every form.

Promotes and supports the study of design histories internationally.

An international design competition for product design, communication design and design concepts.

Attempts to create a virtual library containing all public domain musical scores, as well as scores from composers who are willing to share their music with the world without charge.

American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP): a not-for-profit performance-rights organization that protects its members' musical copyrights by monitoring public performances of their music. Provides a database of works registered to ASCAP.

Database of copyright or license holders of musical compositions registered with BMI. BMI is the bridge between songwriters and the businesses and organizations that want to play their music publicly.

Wiki of historical choral music, all in the public domain, and, therefore, available to be performed in reenactments.

The Aria Database is a collection of information about opera and operatic arias. Besides providing basic information about each aria, the Database includes translations for many arias and aria texts for those that are not affected by copyright restrictions. The Database also provides access to a collection of operatic sound files to give visitors an idea of what each aria sounds like.

Published by the UCLA Music Library in eScholarship, the Contemporary Music Score Collection includes the digital, open access scores in the Contemporary Score Edition, the first open access edition of new music published by a library, and scores from the Kaleidoscope 2020 Call for Scores, an open access collaboration with the UCLA Music Library.

(UCLA Library. Performing Arts Special Collections) American popular songs in the form in which they were originally published.

This website provides links to substantial open-access projects of use to musicians and musicologists.

Makes historical sound recordings available to the public free of charge. The Jukebox includes recordings from the extraordinary collections of the Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center and other contributing libraries and archives.

Over 125,000 songs celebrating North America’s Spanish-language musical heritage.

The UCSB Library has created a digital collection of more than 10,000 cylinder recordings held by the UCSB Library. To bring these recordings to a wider audience, the Library makes them available to download or stream online for free.

Index of primary music sources and their location in libraries, archives, and other institutions around the world.

DDM-Online is an international database of bibliographic records for completed dissertations and new dissertation topics in the fields of musicology, music theory, and ethnomusicology, as well as in related musical, scientific, and humanistic disciplines.

The Judaica Sound Archives is a major center for the collection, preservation and digitization of Judaica audio recordings. The JSA is located in the Wimberly Library on the Boca Raton campus of Florida Atlantic University.

The Getty Publications Virtual Library contains more than 250 titles spanning its forty-year publishing history. Titles are searchable by title, author, and keyword and include full descriptions, tables of contents, links to read online, to purchase the print book, to find in a library, or to download the complete PDF for free for personal use.

The Prints and Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC) contains catalog records and digital images representing a rich cross-section of still pictures held by the Prints & Photographs Division and, in some cases, other units of the Library of Congress. The Library of Congress offers broad public access to these materials as a contribution to education and scholarship.

In these TED Talks, some of the world's greatest photographers -- from places like National Geographic, Time and Magnum -- share stunning images and the stories behind them.

The collection contains Bonnie Cashin's personal archive documenting her design career. The collection includes Cashin's design illustrations, writings on design, contractual paperwork, photographs of her clothing designs, and press materials including press releases and editorial coverage of her work.

Online access to digitized fashion content from Europe’s leading museums and archives.

FIT's online collection contains an extensive searchable and browseable gallery. The collection's strength is primarily in modern and contemporary women's fashion.

KCI's Digital Archive includes a browseable interface to view costumes by time period from the early 18th century to the mid-20th century.

An array of costumes serves to examine how fluctuations in fashionable dress expressed the changing role of women in twentieth-century society.

Spanning five centuries, our Fashion collection is the largest and most comprehensive collection of dress in the world. Key items in the collection include rare 17th century gowns, 18th century ‘mantua’ dresses, 1930s eveningwear, 1960s daywear and post-war couture.

Guide from NYPL with links to major internet sites featuring dance performance.

Digital project from NYU Libraries and NYU's Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics that "provides a digital venue for documenting the expression of social and political life through performance."

Free online dance videos, managed by a community of dance professionals and supported and coordinated by the Maison de la Danse in Lyon.

This freely available collection of digitized videos contains materials from the Mikhail Baryshnikov Archive, the Ronald K. Brown Video Archive, the Merce Cunningham Archive, and more.

Art21 provides unparalleled access to the artist’s voice to diverse audiences around the world, using the power of digital media to introduce millions of people to contemporary art and artists. Some Art21 videos also available on Kanopy.

Published by the Getty Research Institute of the J. Paul Getty Trust and the French Institut de l'Information Scientifique et Technique du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (INIST-CNRS), BHA is the most comprehensive art bibliography available worldwide, covering European and American visual arts from late antiquity to 2009.

The Getty Publications Virtual Library contains more than 250 titles spanning its forty-year publishing history. Titles are searchable by title, author, and keyword and include full descriptions, tables of contents, links to read online, to purchase the print book, to find in a library, or to download the complete PDF for free for personal use.

Louisiana Channel contributes to the permanent development of the museum as a cultural platform, expressing a desire to sharpen the understanding of the importance of culture and the arts.

MetPublications is a portal to The Met's comprehensive publishing program with over 1,500 titles, including books, online publications, and Bulletins and Journals from the last five decades.