Google Arts & Culture
artsandculture.google.com
Ultra-high-resolution digitized collections from thousands of museums worldwide, viewable in gigapixel detail down to individual brushstrokes.
Why it is useful
It aggregates collections from institutions that would otherwise require an in-person visit — and in many cases, its gigapixel zoom shows more brushstroke-level detail than you could actually see standing in front of the original painting.
More in Archives
Other archives you might not have heard of.
- British PathéA digitized archive of over 100,000 historical newsreel films from 1896 to 1976, freely viewable online and covering major world events.
- Wikimedia CommonsWikipedia's free media repository, holding tens of millions of freely licensed images, audio and video files with licence details for each.
- Sounds of the ForestCrowdsourced library of forest sounds from around the world, freely downloadable for any use.
- Standard EbooksA volunteer project that produces carefully formatted, beautifully typeset ebooks of public domain literature — far higher quality than most free ebook sites.
- Perseus Digital LibraryA foundational digital humanities project from Tufts University providing free access to classical Greek and Latin texts with integrated dictionaries and morphological analysis.
- Wayback MachineBrowse over 800 billion archived web pages spanning decades of internet history.