Illustration databases

27 januari 2010

This page contains a number of resources for finding illustration material pertaining to Dutch science.

Netherlands

• The web site of the Dutch bureau for the documentation of the history of art Den Haag contains databases with various options: portraits, painters, keywords, objects depicted, etc.
• Het Geheugen van Nederland (Memory of the Netherlands; National Archives): contains a multitude of historical images.
• Amsterdam University maintains a large historical image collection, part of which is available online. It contains, among others, portraits, paintings, etchings, posters, educational materials, models, scientific instruments, coins, archives and photographs. Particularly its photography collection is gaining in size and importance.
• Other archives containing relevant image collections include the Amsterdam City Archives, the Noord-Hollands Archief in Haarlem (which specialises in history of science collections), the Regionaal Archief te Leiden, or the Zelandia Illustrata in Middelburg.

Rest of the world

• The Science & Society Picture Library: contains more than a million images from the UK Science Museum, the National Media Museum and the National Railway Museum
• Visual Archives (Niels Bohr Library & Archives and the Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics)
• A rich source of illustrations and photographs from the pre-cinematic age can be found on Thomas Weynant’s web site: Early Visual Media.