Three weeks ago, the British Museum quietly launched its comprehensive website of what it calls flat art: mostly so far its enormous collection of prints and drawings. The drawings, 50,000 of them, have all been catalogued; the prints, by no means. It is hard to say how many of them there are. There is a collection of a third of a million bookplates (yet to be tackled, and perhaps a low priority). There are large untapped resources - for instance, French satirical prints - which have not been published elsewhere in any form, and will now become searchable.The website is unrestricted and you can print off any image. A battle was won before this was allowed to happen, and the result is that anyone - student, teacher or amateur - can get hold of a decent A4 reproduction of the drawing or print they are interested in, for personal use. For scholarly use, there will shortly be an automatic downloading option that gives a free image (for use in a scholarly article or book) of a suitable quality for reproduction. This is going to make an amazing difference in academic life, and it is part of a general trend (begun by Mark Jones at the V&A) of public institutions not charging for educational use of copyright material.
Source: The Guardian
See Also: History of the Project
Began back in 1979. "New images are being added to the database at the rate of about 2,000 each week."
You may search here for 27,000 works and over 43,000 images from the V&A collections. Type one or more search terms in the box on the left. The database covers a wide range of objects, including ceramics, fashion, furniture, glass, metalwork, paintings, photographs, prints, sculpture, and textiles. Some of the objects here are not on display.
The Search options give access to databases for works of art, rare books and archives. The site is regularly updated as more objects, books and archives are catalogued and photographed. This is the first time that the Royal Academy is making its Collection accessible online and is the result of an ambitious project to conserve, photograph and catalogue all its entire collection of works of art, books and archives.
Web users can now access over 6,000 highlights from the collection, including photographs, works of art, audio extracts, aircraft and vehicles, documents and library material as well as detailed catalogue information on over 160,000 items.
Also included are short essays on major historical themes that lead you to selected highlights from the collections.
The Collections encompass a wealth of material:
* 19,000 painting, drawings and sculptures
* 15,000 posters
* 120 million feet of cine film
* 10,000 hours of videotape
* 56,000 hours of historical sound recordings
* 6 million photographs, negatives and transparencies
* 270,000 items in the national library
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