Image collections

Birkbeck has various image collections that include material related to the history of the college, London architecture, and garden history.

Birkbeck's image collections can be browsed on a database called JSTOR.

Registering for an account on JSTOR will give you a personal workspace that allows you to save and organise your images in folders. You can share items and folders with Birkbeck students and staff and export them as reference lists or presentations. There is more information in the links below:

• Benefits of a JSTOR account
• Introduction to your workspace
• Sharing folders

If you have any problems, please contact us. 

Browse the image collections

Birkbeck image collections

• Birkbeck History: images of buildings, staff, students and important events in Birkbeck's history.
• The Album of Anna Birkbeck: a complete digitisation of Anna Birkbeck's 250-page album, rediscovered in the Birkbeck archives. The diary spans the years 1825 to c.1862 and contains contributions from noted intellects of the day, including an unpublished poem by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, entitled 'The Death of Love'
• The Album of Anna Birkbeck (individual pages): individual pages from Anna Birkbeck's album, which makes it easier to search.
• The Conservation of the Album of Anna Birkbeck: a collection of photographs of the conservation work undertaken on Anna Birkbeck's album by Alexandra Bruce in 2011.
• The Scrapbook of Anna Birkbeck: a digitisation of Anna Birkbeck's scrapbook, rediscovered in the Birkbeck archives.
• The Scrapbook of Anna Birkbeck (individual pages): selected individual pages from Anna Birkbeck's scrapbook, which makes it easier to search.
• Officers of Birkbeck College: a collection of portraits of the past and present Presidents, Principals, Masters and Secretaries of Birkbeck.
• Coade Stone: a collection of digitised slides, bequeathed to Birkbeck by Averill Alison Kelly, which includes images of architectural, monumental, sculptural and ornamental uses of Coade Stone, developed by Eleanor Coade in the late 1700s, in the UK.
• Garden History Online: Available to Birkbeck students and staff only.  Over 1350 images of historical and contemporary gardens and parks around the world, digitised from Birkbeck's former Central Slide Library.
• London Architecture Online: Available to Birkbeck students and staff only. Over 5500 images of London architecture and urban spaces from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century, mostly digitised from Birkbeck's former Central Slide Library.
• Peltz Gallery: images of contemporary art and events in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. Peltz Gallery invites artists, academics and audiences to re-examine the world through art. 

Other image collections

• General collections 
  • ARTSTOR: high-quality images and media from some of the world’s top photo archives, museums, libraries, scholars, and artists, including rare materials not available anywhere else. Artstor’s collections also include Open Access collections from partner museums freely available to all. All content in Artstor is rights-cleared for education and research - you are free to use it in classroom instruction and handouts, presentations, student assignments, and other noncommercial educational and scholarly activities
  • British Library Images Online
  • Flickr Commons: access to a range of public photography archives
  • JSTOR: important and rare collections from libraries, museums, archives, and historical societies around the world
  • LUNA Commons Collections: over 138,000 open-access images from institutional digital image collections
  • Cornell University Library digital collections
• Arts and humanities collections
  • AMICA Library: 108,000 fine art images from major museums around the world
  • Art & Architecture: Courtauld Institute of Art online image archive
  • Artcyclopedia: a portal for art history, art movements, artists, art images, and links to major art museums
  • Beazley Archive of Classical Art and Architecture
  • French Sculpture Census: French sculpture 1500-1960 in North American public collections
  • Hypermedia Research Archive: complete writings and pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti
  • National Palace Museum: around 5000 images of artworks, including rare books, ceramics, paintings, bronzes, jewellery, studio accessories, costumes, and more, from the National Palace Museum in Taipei, spanning seven millennia of Chinese history and prehistory
  • US National Library of Medicine: 70,000 images (portraits, photographs, cartoons, posters) of the history of medicine from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century
  • Visual Arts Data Service (VADS)
  • Web Gallery of Art: a searchable database of over 38,000 European artworks from 1100 to 1850
  • The Wenceslaus Hollar Digital Collection: 2455 illustrative prints of seventeenth-century England from the University of Toronto Library
• Arts and humanities museums and galleries
  
  • Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum
  • Birmingham: City Art Gallery
  • Cambridge: Fitzwilliam Museum
  • France: Joconde: a database of French museum collections
  • London: British Museum Collections: research database of over three million objects in the British Museum Collections
  • London: British Museum Images: access to over two million years of human history and culture through an extensive collection of footage and images
  • London Picture Archive: City of London Archives and Guildhall Art Gallery: 130,000 images of London life
  • London: National Gallery
  • London: National Portrait Gallery
  • London: Royal Academy of Arts
  • London: Tate Collection
  • London: V&A Museum Images
  • London: V&A Collections
  • London: Wallace Collection
  • Madrid: Prado Museum
  • New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art
  • Paris: Louvre Collections
  • Paris: Musee d'Orsay
• Science collections
  
  • CalPhotos: natural history image collection
  • NASA Images
  • OpenGeoscience: maps, download data, scans, photos
  • US National Library of Medicine: images from the history of medicine
  • Wellcome Images
  • Science History Institute
• Social sciences, geography, and history collections
  • British Library Images Online - Social science geography and history
  • Digital Bodleian: Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford special collections
  • Historic England Archive: photographs from Historic England
  • Historical Photographs of China
  • New York Public Library Digital Collections
  • School of Oriental and African Studies Digital Archives and Special Collections
  • The Wenceslaus Hollar Digital Collection: artistic works of Wenceslaus Hollar from the University of Toronto Library

Notice and take-down policy

• Complaints may concern, but are not limited to:
• rights issues 
• unauthorised digital reproduction 
• copying and data protection. 
• If you are the rights owner of any material in the Birkbeck Image Collections that you have not given permission to publish, please contact the Image Collections and Digital Media staff, detailing:
  
  • full metadata details of the record that describes the image 
  • exact URL where you found the image 
  • confirmation that you are the rights owner or that you are authorised to act for the rights owner 
  • the reason you believe your rights have been infringed 
  • your contact details (including email address and telephone). 
• Birkbeck Library will acknowledge receipt of your complaint and make an initial assessment of its validity. If the complaint is deemed valid, the image and metadata record will be temporarily removed from the Birkbeck JSTOR Collections website, pending an agreed solution. 
• Birkbeck Library will conduct further investigation on the image and/or metadata and aim to resolve the issue swiftly and amicably to the satisfaction of both Birkbeck Library and the complainant, with the following possible outcomes: 
• The image and metadata records both remain unchanged. 
• The image remains unchanged, but the metadata record is amended. 
• The image and metadata record are both permanently removed.