When I present to classes, I often am asked to show them where they can find images of classical artworks, sites, or archaeological finds to use for presentations or even as references when writing a paper. There are relatively few subscription databases that provide images; at UGA we subscribe to CAMIO, which has images from North American museums, including the MFA Boston and its collection of classical materials, but we don’t subscribe to ArtStor, the biggie in the field. We do have a campus Visual Resources Center, with access limited to campus users (by arrangement on a per-class basis with the librarian). But often students want free-web images.
Perseus has an Art and Archaeology Artifact Browser, which is somewhat limited in its coverage but provides good scholarly information for students. A simple Google image search can find some things; limiting the search to .edu sites can be even more useful (one does this in the Advanced Search interface). Flickr is another place to look – some faculty clearly stash their teaching images here, and there are a striking number of really good photographers who like to travel to Mediterannean sites and museums. Especially useful is a group pool of more than 25,000 images at Flickr called Chiron, which collects Creative Commons-licensed images of the classical world.
I also remind students that for educational purposes, it’s fine to scan an image from a print book or scholarly article and use it in a powerpoint presentation or attach it to a paper. We have several flatbed scanners in the Library, and in the Miller Learning Center scholarly commons building where my office is.
Next week I am taking myself firmly in hand and starting to review reference resources in classical philosophy. Somebody hold me!
Becoming a Classics Librarian 