Research Guides: Design for Stage and Film: Finding Images/Videos

Fair Use of Images

Consult the Libraries' Copyright Research Guide to learn about the many cases in which copyright law permits re-use.

Finding Images in Books at NYU Libraries

To find images within books in the library's catalog:

Go to the search box and click on "Advanced Search."
Then enter the topic in the first box limit to "Anywhere in the Record."
In the second box enter either "illus." or "ill." (for illustrations) or "Plates" (for color plates) or "Color"; choose "Anywhere in the Record."

The Library's Catalog
Books & More
Search for books, journals and other print materials, videos, sound recordings, e-books, e-journals, databases, and indexes in local libraries and special collections

Websites & Databases for Finding Images

Image Collections at NYU Libraries
List of Databases found for Image Collections
Google Images
New York Public Library Digital Gallery
Provides access to over 275000 images digitized from the library collections, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, etc.

ARTstor
ARTstor is a repository of images of art, architecture, and design. The images are sourced from museums, libraries, archives, and photographers. ARTstor includes a suite of software tools to view, present, and manage images for research and teaching. ARTstor is supplemented by additional content, including publicly available image collections and locally-produced NYU collections.

Artstor has merged with JSTOR. You can now search for Artstor images through the JSTOR platform. This link directs you to the JSTOR image search.

In order to download images, users must create an account.
AP Newsroom

AP Newsroom (formerly AP Images) contains photos and audio gathered by Associated Press reporters around the world. Content is updated daily and continuously. The archive also includes the NYC Associated Press Daybook (the AP Daybook), the current year's photo report, and historical images dating from the 1500s. Photos and audio may be downloaded or printed.
Oxford Art Online
Oxford Art Online allows searching across both the Benezit Dictionary of Artists and Grove Art Online. The Benezit Dictionary of Artists is a standard reference collection of artists' biographies. It is international in scope, and covers all periods and styles. In addition to biographies, many entries include bibliographies, auction sales data, and images of signatures, monograms, or other marks of identification. Grove Art Online is composed of signed, scholarly encyclopedia entries on all aspects of global art, design and architecture. Individual articles are updated periodically, and new articles reflecting contemporary developments in the arts are added on a regular basis.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the United States.
Brooklyn Museum
The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At 560,000 square feet (52,000 m2), the museum is New York City's third largest in physical size and holds an art collection with roughly 1.5 million works.[
Library of Congress American Memory
Online access to print, pictorial and audio-visual collections and other digital services
The Museum of the City of New York
The Museum holds approximately 750,000 objects in its collection, and while many of them are used in support of our special exhibitions, not all of them can be on view at once. You may also explore nearly 190,000 objects from our collections, now available as part of our ongoing digitization project.
keyword = theatre sets
American Museum of Natural History
Visit the NYC institution dedicated to exploring human cultures, the natural world, and the known universe. Open 363 days a year from 10 am-5:45 pm.

Theatre in Context Collection
O’Dell’s Annals of the New York Stage, the Oxford University Press Companion series, and Greenwood’s American Theatre Companies series are just a few of the many in-copyright sources included in the Theatre in Context Collection. Placed alongside thousands of playbills, posters, photographs, and related theatrical ephemera, users will be able to paint a more comprehensive picture of the life and evolution of dramatic works.

World Digital Library
Includes primary materials from world cultures, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and more.
LIFE Photo Archive
Growing historical photo archive for LIFE magazine, hosted by Google
Getty Images
Includes stock photography, editorial photos, and some moving images.
VADS
Thousands of visual arts images, including fashion, design, prints, and sculpture.
Flicker Commons
A free public collection of photographs from major photography archives. Contributors include the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, and more.
American Memory Digital Collections
Ad*Access
Images and database information for over 7,000 advertisements printed in U.S. and Canadian newspapers and magazines between 1911 and 1955.
Empre Online
Includes documents segment called "The Visible Empire," which includes color plates, maps, and more.
Images from the History of Medicine
Keyword-searchable images from the National Library of Medicine. Includes portraits, pictures of institutions, caricatures, genre scenes, and graphic art in a variety of media.
CalPhotos
From UCB Biodiversity Sciences Technology Group, this site contains thousands of photos, including plants, animals, fossils, people, and world cultures.
Brander Matthews Dramatic Museum Theatre and Costume print collection, 1787-1966
Appointed to the Columbia College faculty in 1892, Matthews began collecting theater-related memorabilia in 1911, convinced that the only way to learn about drama was through first-hand acquaintance with artifacts, images, and texts of the theatrical past. Matthews then donated his own collection of theatrical memorabilia to the University to support the burgeoning study of world-wide theater history. He commissioned stage models representing historical periods, collected the scripts and theatrical designs of his contemporaries, gathered more than 30,000 images of actors and entertainers, and purchased masks and puppets from dealers and performers all over the world.

Streaming Video at NYU Libraries

Video Collections at NYU
Full-content audio and video, available 24/7 to New York University users with an NYU-Net ID and password.