Your Best Image Bets:
Meta Resources, Image Archives
and Databases

 

Meta Resources

Instead of browsing through the large databases of search engines and directories, or waiting for automated image bots to catch up with the increasing domination of multimedia on the Web, try using one of the meta image resources listed below.

Digital Librarian: Images
Essentially an alphabetical list of annotated links, maintained by Margaret Vail Anderson, a librarian in Cortland, New York. A very good starting point for image research.

 

General Image Archives and Databases

American Memory from the Library of Congress
Gateway to over 100 historical collections and over 7 million digital items for the National Digital Library. Use the "Collection Finder" for best search results. Find images by broad topic, such as art, education, sports and technology. Or, locate materials based upon their format; i.e., documents, maps, photos, sounds. Also visit the section called "How to Cite Electronic Sources" for helpful information about citing resources in the American Memory Project.

Ditto.com - "The Leading Visual Search Engine"
Launched in August 1999. As of 2001, database now contains over 6 million images evaluated from over 115 million images. Although based upon proprietary search technology, Ditto.com also uses human evaluators to "return high-quality, useful, non-objectionable picture-based results from the web." Search via keyword, browse the categories. A recommended site for virtually any image.

Pics4Learning - "Copyright-Friendly Images for Education"
An image library for teachers and students which currently contains thousands of images donated by students, teachers, and amateur photographers. Please Note: Permission has been granted for teachers and students to use all of the images donated to the Pics4Learning collection. Pics4Learning is a partnership between Orange County Public Schools Technology Development Unit of Orlando, Florida, and Tech4Learning, Inc.