This guide is intended to assist you in locating images relating to ecology for reuse in artistic collage work.
If you have questions, reach out to Humanities Librarian Patrick Williams for tips and assistance.
The New York Public Library provides access to many relevant image collections. The whole of the 800,000+ images are keyword searchable from this digital collections interface, and allow for browsing based on broad subject terms like Botany and genres like Botanical Illustrations. Below are some links to example texts to explore:
While primarily a textual archive, Biodiversity Heritage Library also offers nature images represented within publications and other resources it contains. Images can be easily located when you search your terms with “pictorial works”. For example, the query ["pictorial works" spiders] locates materials classified as including images and the term spiders. You may then browse search results and click immediately through to the illustrations and images they contain. BHL also offers browseable metadata (for example, animal-based subject headings like "Beetles") to explore for more images as you begin to find what you're looking for.
The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History offers more than 5 million specimen records are currently available from its collections. You can use the links on this page to navigate the botany, entomology, paleobiology, and vertebrate zoology collections.
The UK Natural History Museum's catalog offers works containing images -- make sure to include illustration or image in your search. You may encounter some items in their print collections in the search results, but you can filter by Open Access to limit to things you can immediately view online.
The American Museum of Natural History has a small but interesting collection of nearly 2,000 images sourced from their Rare Books and Manuscript collections. Many, many more photographs and visual materials from Expeditions & Research are available as a searchable collection as well. Thematic groupings based on genre (Work/Object type), like Field Artwork, is also an interesting method of exploration here.
Europeana, the EU Digital Humanities Portal, offers a vast collection of Natural History collections. You may browse items and thematic collections like these:
You may also search--use keywords to reveal relevant results, and then filter by Image in Type of Media, like bees; image.
You can use the Library of Congress's Prints & Photographs Online Catalog to locate relevant images as well. That collection is deeply described with *very* specific subject headings that you can browse, like the following examples:
Wikimedia Commons also features a huge collection of images, searchable in a familiar way, with lots of chances to discover, explore, and develop good search terms for this and other resources. Browsing the categories at the bottom of each page (beneath External Links) offers opportunities for thematic searching for, say, Vulnerable Animals.
Our library databases include hundreds of thousands of images. Some of the best options are below--in these cases you may need to filter your results for images, search image captions, or browse individual relevant documents to source the images.
Art, architecture, and archaeology images including images from the Smithsonian, the MoMA collection for architecture and design and the Schlesinger photograph collection on the history of women in America.