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Worldwide (English) Change
CAMIO : Overview

Overview

CAMIO—Catalog of Art Museum Images Online—is a premiere resource of works of art from prominent museums around the world. Showcasing a wide range of fine and decorative art, CAMIO provides high-quality art images for education, research and enjoyment. All content is rights-cleared for educational use. Every work in CAMIO is represented by at least one high-resolution image and a description. Many have additional views of the work, sound, video and curatorial notes.

Students, faculty, researchers, museum professionals and library visitors will find CAMIO to be a valuable tool. CAMIO provides images for art history and studio art programs, course Web sites, lectures, presentations, class projects and research resources. It is a single point of entry to many collections, providing unlimited and powerful, Web-based searching.

The scope of the CAMIO collection ranges from 3000 BC to the present. The content includes about 95,000 works of art—photographs,paintings, sculpture, decorative and utilitarian objects, prints, drawings and watercolors, jewelry and costumes, textiles and architecture—plus audio, video and mixed media. Difficult-to-find contemporary art is one of its strengths.

CAMIO art images span the following categories:

  • Photographs
  • Prints
  • Sculptures
  • Paintings
  • Decorative Arts
  • Posters
  • Costumes
  • Utilitarian Objects
  • Jewelry

A Closer Look


Art Institute of Chicago, Ryerson and Burnham Libraries use online image database to serve museum and school


Since opening in 1879, the Art Institute of Chicago focuses on preserving the great artworks of the world as well as producing great artists. Leigh Gates knows both sides of the Institute very well. She's the visual resources librarian and her role is supporting everything from student projects and course lectures to museum education programs.

Many of the requests she handles are for images not just from the museum's collections, but from other collections as well. And that's been the challenge: finding an easy way to share and access fine art images. The benefits of CAMIO was obvious to Gates and as a result "we immediately became subscribers and have been ever since."

Gates downloads images she needs from CAMIO to support the Institute's school and museum educational needs. "It's a wonderful way for the Art institute to get images of beautiful objects out there for people to use." And she knows firsthand about that demand. "We have voracious users," says Gates. So keeping them well supplied with fine art images makes her job a lot easier.

According to Gates, CAMIO is extremely useful to support the art school courses. "We look at the curriculum to understand what's going to be needed. Then we start harvesting images from CAMIO and adding them to our local database." Once in that database, the images are available to students and instructors at the school.