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Primary Sources: Art, Design, and Material Culture

Let's start at the very beginning. A very good place to start.

Art, Design, and Material Culture

-Archives of American Art: Terra Foundation for Digital Collections

The Terra Foundation Center for Digital Collections is a virtual repository holding a substantial portion of the Archives of American Art's most significant collections. Since 2005, over 125 archival collections have been scanned and posted online in their entirety.

-Artstor

The Artstor Digital Library contains over 1.8 million digital images in the arts, architecture, the humanities, and science from outstanding international museums, photographers, libraries, scholars, and photo archives.

-Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Cooper Hewitt is the only museum in the United States dedicated solely to design. The website offers approximately ninety-two percent of the museum’s holdings.

-Freer and Sackler Archives

The Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives is a manuscript and photograph repository dedicated to furthering the study of Asian and Middle Eastern art and culture.

-G. Vincent Voice Library

The G. Robert Vincent Voice Library is a collection of over 100,000 hours of spoken word recordings, dating back to 1888.

-Images of Commemorative Fabrics from Africa

Commemorative Fabrics from Africa is a collection of machine-made commemorative textiles from various African countries.

-IMLS Digital Collections and Content

The IMLS DCC aggregation brings together cultural heritage collections and exhibits from libraries, museums, and archives from across the country, providing both collection-level and item-level access to facilitate searching and browsing and to retain the institutional identities and collection contexts that are vital to how users explore and interact with cultural heritage materials.

-MIT Global Shakespeare Project

The MIT Global Shakespeare Project has constructed an environment for teaching and research based on digital copies of primary documents in all media, including texts, high-resolution page images of early editions, digital collections of art, illustration and stage photographs, and film and performance videos. 

-Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum

The Renwick Gallery is home to the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s collection of contemporary craft and decorative art. The museum offers users extensive access to their holdings through a searchable database.