History of Science and Technology 

Ad*Access - About 7,000 advertisements, mainly from U.S. publications, dating between 1911 and 1955. This site focuses on ads that relate to one of five main categories: Beauty and Hygiene, Transportation, Radio, Television, and World War II.

Emergence of Advertising in America, 1850-1920 -- This collection, part of Library of Congress's American Memory Collection, contains more than 9,000 images.

Boston and Its Neighborhoods -- Collections of historic photographs, prints, paintings, and more of Boston and related images.

Great Buildings Collection -- This site has images of "more than 1000 great buildings from around the world and across history."

Maryland Historical Society -- In addition to its 80,000+ photographs, the MDHS has online exhibitions.

American Institute of Physics, Emilio Segre Visual Archives -- "More than 30,000 historical digital images, photographs, slides, lithographs, engravings, drawings, and other visual materials. The collection is strongest in images of modern American physicists, astronomers, and geophysicists, but includes many other scientists as well as photos and illustrations of laboratories, telescopes, accelerators, and other instruments, objects, and places."

Images from the Hubble Space Telescope

NASA's Image Gallery

Royal Society of Chemistry image collection -- This page describes the collection: it has about 8,000 images, about 2,000 of which have been digitized.

To see them, you must use their library catalogue. (For example, in the search box I entered mendeleev image and did get a description of a picture plus the picture itself. But note: the picture had "Royal Society of Chemistry copyright" printed all the way across it!)

Cities around the World, a digital collection created by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, is a collection of photographs from more than 450 cities. They cover 1940s-1990s and show architecture and street life, with information about location, subject, and date.

NOTE: Only the low-resolution photos are free, and their use must fall under "fair use."

Image Archive on the American Eugenics Movement -- Mostly materials from “the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, which was the center of American eugenics research from 1910-1940.

"In the Archive you will see numerous reports, articles, charts, and pedigrees that were considered scientific 'facts' in their day.'

Historic Map Collections of the Sheridan Libraries -- This site lists all the maps held at JHU's Eisenhower, Peabody, and Garrett libraries, with some of the maps online. Our holdings include maps of "Baltimore City and Maryland from the mid-nineteenth through the twentieth century, including road maps, souvenir and tourist maps, and topographical maps."

In addition, we also have maps of early 19th-century Baltimore, including a complete set of city directory maps, charts of the Chesapeake Bay from the late 19th through early 20th centuries, maps related to military campaigns, and more.

National Geographic -- There are printer-friendly maps that you can print for free. There is also a collection of maps that can be viewed and whose magnifications can be changed. The small search box doesn't allow very detailed searching, but this site is definitely worth a look.

Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, 1890-1970 -- Sanborn maps are marvelous tools for learning about the history, growth, and development of American cities, towns, and neighborhoods. The maps includes information such as the outline of each building, construction materials, location of windows and doors, street names, street and sidewalk widths, building use, and house and block numbers.

The library owns maps for Maryland and the District of Columbia. For more help with using the maps, please contact the Government Publications/Maps/Law Library.

National Library of Medicine, Online Exhibitions and Digital Projects -- A variety of exhibitions that include images as well as written material. One of the exhibitions is Dream Anatomy, which shows "the anatomical imagination in some of its most astonishing incarnations, from 1500 to the present."

What's the current online exhibit?

American Institute of Physics, Emilio Segre Visual Archives -- "More than 30,000 historical digital images, photographs, slides, lithographs, engravings, drawings, and other visual materials. The collection is strongest in images of modern American physicists, astronomers, and geophysicists, but includes many other scientists as well as photos and illustrations of laboratories, telescopes, accelerators, and other instruments, objects, and places."

Contributions of 20th Century Women to Physics -- This site includes an annotated portrait gallery of some of the 83 women on the site.

Darwin Online -- This site contains all of Darwin's publications, including 20,000 private papers, a manuscript catalogue, specimens, biographies, obituaries, reviews, reference works, and much more. (An enormous number of people and institutions contributed to this site.)

The Galileo Project -- This project, all about Galileo, includes portraits of Galileo and other scientists.

Profiles in Science -- This National Library of Medicine project presents online archival collections of prominent 20th century scientists, physicians, and others.

Not surprisingly, the Library of Congress, in Washington, D.C., has an extraordinary collection of historical images of the United States. Please note that Library of Congress images and collections are vast and generally don't get picked up by search engines.

American Memory Project, Library of Congress. Here is the complete list of collections in the American Memory Project.

Many American Memory collections contain sound recordings, video, high-resolution images, and enhanced text that require special viewers. Most viewers can be downloaded free from vendor sites; here is a chart of formats and players, if needed.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has a wonderful collection of online photo graphs.

NOAA's photo library includes thousands of images of weather and space, hundreds of images of U.S. shores and coastal seas, and thousands of marine species images ranging from whales to plankton.