UWM Libraries Research and Course Guides: Costume Research: Visual Resources

Digital Collections from Libraries and Museums

Searching Google for images is quick and easy. The problem is that that the descriptions for them are often unreliable or incomplete. But libraries and museums often digitize materials and provide accurate information. There are many options out there, but a few that might be useful for historical costume research are:

Library of Congress Digital Collections
Large set of digital collections of art, photographs, documents, recordings, etc., mostly from the US.
Google Arts & Culture
Google Arts & Culture page on fashion draws on digital images from museums and libraries around the world.
Europeana: Fashion
Search portal for items in European libraries and museums
New York Public Library Digital Collections
Digitized images from the NYPL, organized into themed collections and searchable.
V&A Museum: Fashion
Digital collection from the V&A museum in London.
Met Museum: Costume Institute
Costume collection of the Met Museum

Library Databases

The library subscribes to a lot of resources that have what would be considered primary source visual information - newspapers like the NY Times going back to 1851 and ArtStor. This is a selective list of them.

Artstor
Artstor is a digital library of over 2 million images in the areas of art, architecture, the humanities, and social sciences with a set of tools to view, present, and manage images for research and pedagogical purposes. The library is constantly growing with new collections added monthly, continually expanding areas of reference and study. All images are accompanied by comprehensive metadata and are rights-cleared for educational use. Detailed Artstor-produced Library Guides are available as well as a Artstor-produced Library Guide for Copyright and Image Use in the Artstor Digital Library.
Index of Medieval Art
Includes images and descriptive data related to the iconography of works of art produced between late Antiquity and the sixteenth century. Although the Index of Medieval Art was formerly known as the Index of Christian Art, it now includes secular subjects as well as a growing number of subjects from medieval Jewish and Islamic culture.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online (Gale Primary Sources)
Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO)is a comprehensive digital edition of The Eighteenth Century, the world's largest library of the printed book on microfilm. Access includes the original base collection of 135,000 volumes (ECCO I) plus a 45,000 volume supplement (ECCO II).
Gilded Age, The
Spanning from 1865 to 1902, The Gilded Age provides insight into the key issues that shaped America in the late nineteenth century, including race and ethnicity, immigration, labor, women's rights, American Indians, political corruption, and monetary policy. The Gilded Age brings together primary documents and scholarly commentary into a searchable collection that is the definitive electronic resource for students and scholars researching this important period in American history.

Searching for Digitized Primary Sources Online

Find Primary Sources with DPLA
Searching Online for Digitized Primary Sources

This video demonstrates how to use free primary source search tool Digital Public Library of America (DPLA).

Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)
The Digital Public Library of America brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. It strives to contain the full breadth of human expression, from the written word, to works of art and culture, to records of America’s heritage, to the efforts and data of science.

This video demonstrates how to search for digitized primary using Google and where to find UWM Libraries digital collections and primary source databases.