WorldImages: 75,000 Images from California State University

Scholars and students who study visual culture should be aware of WorldImages, a free and growing resource offering images for use in teaching, scholarship, and research.  WorldImages is a remarkable project initiated and directed by Dr. Kathleen Cohen of California State University.  Over the years she has photographed works related to her teaching, first in the form of slides and more recently in digital format.  As the collection has grown to nearly 75,000 images, so have its contributors.  This is an impressive and inspiring model of collaboration, and a generous example of academic sharing.  As its title suggests, the image collection covers a very broad range of cultures and historical periods.  Check it out!

There are a number of ways to search the collection.  You can browse the collections by themed groups called portfolios, including community portfolios, which comprise interesting and useful sets compiled by community members.  You can also search by keyword, advanced, quick, date, and creator biography searches.  More information is available at the Help and Tutorials pages.

How can these images be used? "Faculty from many disciplines are using the images for research assignments, to create course study pages, to include in their lectures and to create on-line materials. Students are using the image database for study and research, for term papers, and to create collaborative multimedia presentations."

Image: Anonymous, Roman Republican/Early Imperial. Mosaic, Theater masks. Rome, Italy. ©Kathleen Cohen. Work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License.