For our extensive list of databases, see the Media Studies Guide.
Access to primary sources, supporting materials, and archives, along with 125 hours of video related to disability studies.
Access to streaming video on humanitarian and environmental issues. Films cover child trafficking and migration, refugee camps; and human rights issues such as post-conflict support and LGBTQ+ rights. Also covers environmental concerns around plastic pollution, the disappearance of bees; natural disasters, as well as social issues including anti-corruption protests, indigenous people's movements and the impact of technology on global security.
Black Studies in Video is an award-winning black studies portfolio that brings together documentaries, interviews, and previously unavailable archival footage surveying the black experience. The collection contains 500 hours of film covering African American history, politics, art and culture, family structure, gender relationships, and social and economic issues.
The collection includes documentaries on leading artists, writers, musicians, playwrights, and performers, such as Toni Morrison, Langston Hughes, Huey P. Newton, Frantz Fanon, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Eldridge Cleaver, August Wilson, Bobby Seale, Ethel Waters, Amiri Baraka, and Robert F. Williams. The database also draws from the Hatch-Billops Collection, a critically acclaimed archive of primary and secondary resource materials focused on Black American art, drama, and literature. Additional content planned for inclusion are the SNCC archives, the NAACP archives, and archives from select Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
The following services are some of the most popular streaming databases available through IU. Please see the Finding Online Streaming Videos for additional resources.
For our extensive list of databases, see the Media Studies Guide.
The criterion collection is a series of important classic and contemporary films with high technical quality and award-winning, original supplements.
PLEASE NOTE: SWANK MOTION PICTURES REQUIRES GOOGLE WIDEVINE TO BE INSTALLED AND ALLOWED TO PLAY VIDEOS.
Swank Motion Pictures provides licensed movies to numerous non-theatrical markets, including U.S. colleges and universities. The following browsers are supported: Internet Explorer (IE), Firefox, and Safari. Chrome is not a supported browser. Requires Silverlight.
Access to masterclasses, documentaries, interviews. Includes thousands of videos from top artists and producers.
Includes films across all art forms: from performing to performance, from music to electronic media, from physical to spiritual, from visual arts to photography, fashion and later included philosophy and religion, gastronomy, history and politics and psychology.
Alexander Street Press houses millions of pages, audio tracks, videos, images, and playlists in literature; music; women's history; Black history; psychological counseling and therapy; social and cultural history; drama, medical, theater, film, and the performing arts; religion; sociology; and other emerging areas.
Provides access to streaming video of 60 Minutes, the CBS television news program.
Online collection of 500 hours of video from 18 years of broadcasts. Each news segment within the collection serves as a standalone short documentary on a specific news topic. Also includes 175 hours of bonus segments from the CBS News program Sunday Morning.
American History in Video provides a collection of documentaries, newsreels and archival and public affairs footage.
Historical coverage in the collection ranges from the early history of Native Americans, to the lost colony of Roanoke, to the 1988 Vicennes Affair in the Persian Gulf. Biographical coverage ranges from eighteenth century figures such as Benedict Arnold and Daniel Boone to modern day figures such as Thurgood Marshall and Helen Thomas. You may sign in to create, edit and share playlists or clips.
Access to CNN’s specials and feature programming on business, economics, technology, environmental studies, health, women’s studies, and human rights.
Highlights include: “We Will Rise: Michelle Obama's Mission to Educate Girls Around the World;” an interview series with female leaders including Beyonce, Sheryl Sandberg, Oprah, Tina Brown, Michelle Wie, Nancy Pelosi; series like “Future Finance”, “Passion to Portfolio”, “Eco Solutions;" specials on human trafficking, global poverty, and other human rights issues around the world; features on global cities, travel, world cultures, religion, food, and lifestyles outside the western hemisphere.
American public television’s flagship public affairs series.
Documentaries covering the scope and complexity of the human experience.
500 hours of documentaries and interviews illustrating the theory and practice of a variety of art forms and providing the context necessary for critical analysis.
Covers Renaissance, Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Modern, and Contemporary art. Also includes video on applied topics such as architectural and graphic design.
Provides access to documentary and social issues streaming films.
Includes content from such production companies as Bullfrog Films, Icarus Films, Good Docs, Kartemquin Films, MediaStorm, the National Film Board of Canada, Scorpion TV Sincerely Films, Terra Nova Films and KimStim. Includes access to the Docuseek2 Complete Collection 2nd Edition, the Docuseek2 Complete Collection 3rd Edition, and the Icarus Films Collection.
Collection of issues-based documentary films from leading film producers and distributors.
Subjects covered include: environmental studies and sciences, sociology, anthropology, global studies, area studies, women’s studies, history, political science, criminal justice, health, psychology, and the arts.
Access to classic and contemporary documentaries, previously unpublished footage from anthropologists and ethnographers working in the field, and some feature films. Includes searchable transcripts.
Access is for Volumes 1-4.
Ethnographic Video Online, Vols. I and II: Foundational Films
Includes classic and contemporary ethnographies, documentaries and shorts from every continent.
Ethnographic Video Online, Vol. III: Indigenous Voices
Includes films by indigenous filmmakers. Emphasis is on the human effects of climate change, sustainability, indigenous and local ways of interpreting history, cultural change, and traditional knowledge and storytelling.
Ethnographic Video Online, Vol. IV: Festivals and Archives
Includes titles by contemporary visual anthropologists. Also contains the full catalog of anthropology films from Berkeley Media, formerly known as the University of California’s Extension Center for Media.
Provides award-winning documentaries with relevance across the curriculum, presents points of view and historical and current experiences from diverse cultures and traditions world-wide.
Filmakers Library Online provides access to more than 1,500 online streaming titles from the award-winning distributor Filmakers Library. New releases will be added as made available.
Access to documentary films by leading filmmakers and film distributors from around the world aimed at an academic audience. Includes many Oscar nominated documentaries and film festival winners.
This collection assembles hundreds of documentary films and series from the history of the Public Broadcasting Service into one online interface.
For our extensive list of image databases, see the Media Studies Guide.
Alexander Street Press houses millions of pages, audio tracks, videos, images, and playlists in literature; music; women's history; Black history; psychological counseling and therapy; social and cultural history; drama, medical, theater, film, and the performing arts; religion; sociology; and other emerging areas.
Full text biographies, images, and obituaries from the entire run of Current Biography.
Current Biography Illustrated includes the entire contents of the printed monthly Current Biography, published since 1940. There are entries for people making headlines and historical figures dating back to World War II. Entries number more than 15,000 full text biographies, over 9,400 obituaries and more than 19,500 lively images. Profiles provide information on celebrities, politicians, business people, writers, actors, sports figures, artists, scientists, and others.
Collection of images, graphics, and audio provided by The Associated Press. International in scope with images dating back as early as 1826. Please note: to access, select the “AP Newsroom” link on the EBSCO page.
Founded in 1848, the AP is one of the oldest and largest news organization in the world.
Historic American publications, books, broadsides, ephemera, newspapers, dating from as early as 1535 through the 20th Century.
An electronic library containing the AP's current photos and a selection of pictures from their 50 million image print and negative library. International in scope with images dating back as early as 1826.
This resource offers facsimile page images and searchable full text for nearly 500 British periodicals published from the 17th century through to the early 21st.
Includes access to four collections:
British Periodicals Collection I consists of more than 160 journals that comprise the UMI microfilm collection Early British Periodicals, the equivalent of 5,238 printed volumes containing approximately 3.1 million pages. Topics covered include literature, philosophy, history, science, the fine arts and the social sciences.
British Periodicals Collection II consists of more than 300 journals from the UMI microfilm collections English Literary Periodicals and British Periodicals in the Creative Arts together with additional titles, amounting to almost 3 million pages. Topics covered include literature, music, art, drama, archaeology and architecture.
British Periodicals Collection III extends the scope of the program by focusing on leading publications from the first half of the twentieth century. The titles are from the prestigious stable of illustrated periodicals known as the “Great Eight” in British periodical publishing history. They are considered to be among the foremost popular periodicals of the period and were highly influential in their mix of news/politics, miscellany, art, photography, literature and comedy/satire, while launching the careers of many leading artists/illustrators of the age.
British Periodicals Collection IV continues this expansion, offering an eclectic mix of major popular titles from the twentieth century, reflecting the age’s attitudes interests and events across culture, politics and society. Key themes covered in these publications include socialism and the labour movement, international affairs/conflict, leisure/rural life, the arts, travel/empire and childhood/youth.
The collection, dating from 1917-1960 and housed in the Lilly Library, consists primarily of photographs by Frank Michael Hohenberger, 1876-1963, Brown County photographer and newspaperman.
The Hohenberger collection documents the life, customs, and scenes of the hills of Brown County, in addition to other areas of Indiana, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Mexico.
Digital archive of historical newspapers. Each issue of each title includes the complete paper, cover-to-cover, with full-page and article images.
PLEASE NOTE: the Artstor platform is being retired and will no longer be available as of August 1, 2024. Content has already migrated to Artstor on JSTOR. Existing individual Artstor user accounts will carry over to the new JSTOR platform. A digital image library of over 2.5 million digital images in the areas of art, architecture, the humanities, and social sciences. To save or download images, users must register for an individual account.
Users who create an account also gain access to a set of tools for sharing images, curating groups of images, downloading them directly into PowerPoint presentations, and comparing and contrasting images.
An artist directory with millions of paintings and art, artwork prices, valuations, signatures, images and artist biographies.
Database of information about artists, including names, birth and death dates, state or local affiliation, fields in which artist worked, book and periodical references to artist, dealers and museums where works may be viewed, auction prices of works, some biographical details, etc. Aims at being an unbiased source of information about the commercial value of each artist's work through a comprehensive system of comparables.
Online digital library of images sourced from over 8,000 locations covering the world’s major museums, art collections, and historical sites. Includes access to over 3 million images, all copyright-cleared for educational use.
Includes roughly 75,000 images of art, architecture and world cultures, from the Fine Arts Visual Resources Center and licensed sources. Available system-wide. Some images are IUB only.
The Indiana University Department of the History of Art Dido Image Bank is dedicated to the storage of low resolution (72 dpi) images from the Fine Arts Slide Library collection of over 400,000 images. Encompassing the full breadth of art historical periods and media, the Image Bank contains c.60,000 images, both in-house production and commercially licensed. This compendium of digitized images permits convenient use and access with a graphic web browser. The images are presented in thumbnail and 800 x 600 screen res sizes, and many are also now available in a 1024 x 768 screen resolution. Access to the images is available through keyword search. The DIDO home page also has links to other selected image collections available at IU and on the web.
Most of the content of DIDO is available to the IU system, but commercially licensed images are available only on the Bloomington campus.
Resource containing more than 775,000 high-quality runway, backstage, and street style images. Curated by Editor-in-Chief Valerie Steele, Director of the Museum at FIT in New York.
The archive includes: international runway shows from the 1970s until the early 2000s, from over 400 designers, collections from McQueen, Gaultier, Westwood, Chalayan, Galliano, and more. Also includes backstage and front row shots from fashion shows of the past forty years and street-style images from global fashion cities.
Facsimile images of literary manuscripts, including letters and diaries, drafts of poems, plays, novels, and other literary works, and similar materials.
Searching is based on tags and descriptive text associated with each manuscript. Images of the complete manuscript can be viewed, manipulated and navigated on screen. Please note that the text of the manuscripts themselves is not searchable.
British Literary Manuscripts Online is published in two parts: British Literary Manuscripts Online, Medieval and Renaissance and British Literary Manuscripts Online, c. 1660-1900
An image database of medieval and renaissance manuscripts that unites scattered resources from many institutions into an international tool for teaching and scholarly research.
The Digital Scriptorium (DS) is a non-commercial online image database of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, or manuscripts made in the tradition of books before printing. DS unites scattered resources from a consortium of many libraries into a union catalog for teaching and scholarly research in medieval and Renaissance studies. It provides unprecedented access to illuminated and textual manuscripts through digital cataloging records, supported by high resolution images and retrievable by various topic searches. DS enables users from the most casual to the most specialized to study the rare and valuable materials of academic, research, and public libraries. It makes available collections that are often restricted from public access and includes not only recognized masterpieces but also understudied manuscripts that have been previously overlooked for exhibition or publication. DS fosters the public viewing of non-circulating materials otherwise available only within restricted access libraries. As a visual catalog, DS allows scholars and beginners to verify with their own eyes cataloguing information about places and dates of origin, scripts, artists, and quality. Special emphasis is placed on the touchstone materials, i.e., manuscripts signed and dated by their scribes, thus beginning the American contribution to the goal established in 1953 by the Comité international de paléographie latine (International Committee of Latin Paleography): to document photographically the proportionately small number of codices of certain origin that will serve stylistically to localize and date the vast quantities of unsigned manuscripts. DS publishes not only manuscripts of firm attribution but also ones that need the attention of further scholarship and traditionally would have been unlikely candidates for reproduction. Because it is web-based, it also allows for updates and corrections, and as a matter of form individual records in DS can and do acknowledge contributions from outside scholars. DS encourages interaction between the academic and the library world to build a growing and reciprocally beneficial body of knowledge. DS looks to the needs of a very diverse community of specialists: medievalists, classicists, musicologists, paleographers, diplomatists, literary scholars and art historians. At the same time DS recognizes a broader user community in the public that values rare and unique works of historical, literary and artistic significance.
Contains over 70,000 images of original manuscripts (including biographies and chronologies) and printed materials covering Africa, the Americas, Australasia, Oceana, and South Asia.
Includes interactive maps and original documents linked to essays by leading scholars in the field of Empire Studies. The sections cover Cultural Contacts, 1492-1969; Empire Writing and the Literature of Empire; The Visible Empire; Religion and Empire; and Race, Class and Colonialism, c1783-1969. The images are sources from the British Library, including the Oriental and India Office Collections at the British Library; the University of Birmingham Library; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; and the Public Record Office and the State Records, New South Wales, Australia.
Access to original archival materials related to popular culture in the U.S. and U.K. from 1950-1975. Includes color images of manuscript and rare printed material as well as photographs, ephemera and memorabilia.
Over 14,000 Kodachrome slides by amateur photographer Charles W. Cushman (1896-1972) about his travels in the United States and abroad.
Taken by amateur photographer Charles Weever Cushman between 1938 and 1969, the images document an amazing cross-section of American and international subjects, from inner-city storefronts and industrial landscapes to candid portraits and botanical studies. The collection is part of the Indiana University Archives. The richly saturated Kodachrome slides add color to an era primarily recorded in black and white, "a world that we had long since resigned ourselves to viewing only in shades of gray," writes Eric Sandweiss, IU Carmony Chair and Professor of History, in an essay included on the collection's Web site. "In Cushman's work," he observes, "the past becomes, for an instant, impossibly present."
Based on Charles Evans' American Bibliography, this database covers American life and comprises 36,000 works and 2,400,000 images, from 1639 to 1800.
Includes a wide variety of material types, including maps, textbooks, songs and novels. The texts are searchable and browsable by type.
Primary source documents covering the everyday lived experience in England from 1500-1700. Includes legal records, family correspondence, administrative records, wills, inventories and commonplace books, and images of everyday objects used in early modern households.
Also includes contextual essays by leading academics, as well as an interactive chronology.
Digital access to primary source material covering the evolution of food and drink within everyday life and the public sphere. Includes printed and manuscript cookbooks, advertising ephemera, government reports, films, and illustrated content.
Includes access to Modules 1 and 2. The bulk of the material ranges from the sixteenth century to the early twenty-first century. Module 2 includes six rare Apicius cookbooks, the earliest of which dates from the ninth century.
Archival collections documenting topics in eighteenth- through twentieth-century American history. Provides access to digitized letters, papers, photographs, scrapbooks, financial records, diaries, and many more primary source materials taken from the University Publications of America (UPA) Collections.
When looking for images, always pay attention to copyright notes and image attribution/citation guidelines. Below are some commonly used stock photo websites including Unsplash and Adobe Stock.
The following websites offer stock photos with a greater diversity of people (in terms of gender, race, ability, etc.) than many of the larger stock photo website. The list below was partially adapted from: