Resources Outside of Library Databases

Explore the virtual exhibits and collections of one of the world's largest natural history museums.

Explore and reuse millions of digital items from the Smithsonian’s collections. They have released these images and data into the public domain as Creative Commons Zero (CC0), meaning you can use, transform, and share open access assets without asking permission from the Smithsonian.
The Smithsonian is comprised of dozens of museums and libraries created by the US Government including: the National Museum of American History, the National Museum of Air and Space, the National Museum of Natural History, the National Portrait Gallery, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the National Postal Museum, the National Zoological Park, numerous art museums, and more.

The National Gallery of Art is the United States' national art museum system. The Gallery's collection of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, medals, and decorative arts traces the development of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present, including the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas and the largest mobile created by Alexander Calder.

Explore thousands of artworks in the museum’s collection—from renowned icons to lesser-known works from every corner of the globe—as well as our books, writings, reference materials, and other resources.

In February 2017, The Met introduced its Open Access Initiative which makes all images of public-domain artworks and basic data on all accessioned works in its collection available for unrestricted use under Creative Commons Zero (CC0). Now anyone can download, share, and remix images and data about artworks in The Met collection.

Featuring over 1,900 artworks by more than 625 artists, the Collection Online presents a searchable database of selected artworks from the Guggenheim’s permanent collection of approximately 8,000 artworks.

Project Gutenberg is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, as well as to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks." It was founded in 1971 by American writer Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital library. It is home to over 75,000 digitized versions of culturally significant works from Frankenstein to The Wizard of Oz to ancient Greek texts. This is a great resource to find free versions of classic books.

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is a discovery tool, or union catalog, for public domain and openly licensed content held by the United States' archives, libraries, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions. DPLA aggregates access to over 37 million items from some of the U.S.'s most reputable institutions.

Funded by the European Union, the Europeana website provides users with access to cultural heritage items from across Europe. Their goal is to inspire open conversations about European history and culture by providing over 35 million images, 25 million textual items, and hundreds of thousands of audio-visual works for free to researchers around the world.