Art and Design

The Academic Support Librarian team have created two subject guides giving advice on resources relating to race studies, diversifying and decolonising the curriculum, and matters relating to EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion).

You can access the Diversifying Toolkit here.

This guide assists with the work of diversifying resources used in teaching. Designed to help academic staff begin assessing the readings they already use to make their curriculum more inclusive.

You can find the Race and Decolonial Studies subject guide here.

The Illustrated Freelancer’s Guide is a practical resource for the increasing number of artists, makers, writers and other creatives working freelance in Scotland today.

Furniture Link: For free information about contemporary furniture design and sustainable manufacturing click here   

The library's art and design databases webpage is a full list of all the best databases we subscribe to for art and design subjects. 

The following is a selection of publicly-accessible collections which you may find useful. Each collection meets one or more of the following criteria:

• Providing access to high quality images,
• Website terms and conditions permit use for private study or educational purposes,
• Being a nationally or internationally significant collection.

Remember that the exact permitted uses vary for each collection.

You should check each website’s terms and conditions or copyright information before reproducing any images.

Art gallery collections

Courtauld Institute of Art

40,000 images from the Courtauld Institute and Conway Library collections.

Louvre

This website provides access to various databases - some in French only, others available in English - including the Atlas database of 35,000 works of art exhibited in the world-famous Paris museum.

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Metropolitan Museum of Art: more than 400,000 high-resolution digital images of public domain works in the Museum's world-renowned collection may be downloaded directly from the Museum's website for non-commercial use-including in scholarly publications in any media-without permission from the Museum and without a fee. The number of available images will increase as new digital files are added on a regular basis. Works that are covered by the new policy are identified on the Museum's website with the acronym OASC (Open Access for Scholarly Content). The Museum provides access to images of art in its collection that it believes to be in the public domain and free of other known restrictions; these images are now available for scholarly use in any media.

Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York

Browse or search over 30,000 works from the museum’s collection.

National Gallery, London

View the Gallery’s collection of over 2,300 works online, with the ability to zoom in and view paintings in considerable detail.

National Portrait Gallery

Explore and search the online collections of the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Tate Gallery

Online database of the collections of Tate Britain, Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives, including many images and accompanying information.

V&A

The V&A (Victoria and Albert) Museum’s award-winning collections database. Contents include ceramics, fashion, furniture, glass, metalwork, paintings, photographs, prints, sculpture and textiles.

Other digital collections

IDE Virtual Design Museum

A collection of images of work by well-known designers and companies.

UbuWeb

UbuWeb is an independent resource dedicated to avant-garde arts, ethnopoetics, and outsider arts, including film, sound, music and dance. All materials on UbuWeb are made available for non-commercial and educational use only. All rights belong to the author(s). UbuWeb is free to access.

Visual Arts Database (VADS)

An archive of electronic information in the visual arts incorporating a growing number of image collections for educational use.

Visual Collections - images of art, history and culture

Over 300,000 images from 50 collections using Insight image handling software from Luna Imaging.

Europeana

Multimedia portal that allows you to search over 14 million items from museums, libraries, archives and other collections across Europe. These include images of paintings, drawings, maps, photos and museum objects as well as text, audio and video.

Library of Congress

Online catalogue of prints and photographs held by the United States Library of Congress.

LUNA Commons

Provides free access to high quality images from worldwide digital collections of reputable organizations such as galleries and museums, using the Luna Insight browser.

Materia

Dutch registration-based service providing free access to information on thousands of materials.

Stylepark

German registration-based service providing free access to information on thousands of design products and materials.

Collections for art & design at Edinburgh University.

Main Library

Standard and short loan books are shelved, together with reference books for the subject, at Library or Congress (LC) classification shelfmarks N and NA.

Older standard and short loan books are located at Dewey shelfmark .72 onwards.

The following link gives full details of the locations of all of the Main Library's collections:

Edinburgh College of Art (ECA) Library

The ECA Library collection consists of some 65,000 books and 300 periodical subscriptions along with DVDs, maps, slides and artists' books. ECA Library supports learning, teaching and research in architecture, landscape architecture, architectural history, history of art, and art and design.

Art & Architecture Library

Contains books on architectural design, architectural theory and practice, architectural history, construction, planning and urban design, technical books, landscape architecture and landscape history, professional practice, presentation techniques, CAAD and digital media.

About 80 current journal titles and CDs, student dissertations and work placement reports are held in the Art & Architecture Library.

We have various databases dedicated to searching for theses and dissertations.

Edinburgh DataShare is a digital repository of research data produced at the University of Edinburgh, hosted by Information Services Group. Edinburgh University researchers who have produced research data associated with an existing or forthcoming publication, or which has potential use for other researchers, are invited to upload their dataset for sharing and safekeeping.

To access the dataset for the ECA Library artists’ books collection click here

To access the dataset for the University of Edinburgh Musical Instrument Collection click here

To access the dataset for the University of Edinburgh Art Collection click here

Are you interested to know what new resources have been acquired by CAHSS specific to ECA, for academic year 2022/23? Take a look at the subject guide here.