The Museum of New Zealand recently released more than 30,000 images of art and artifacts to download and re-use for free. The images are a mix of public domain images and images labeled with a Creative Commons license. The museum makes it easy to determine how an image is licensed. To determine the licensing of an image simply click on the download button and the next page clearly shows the license for the image.

Finding images in the Museum of New Zealand’s gallery isn’t the most intuitive process. You can enter a keyword to search, but if you’re too specific you might not find what you’re looking for. For example, enter “fish” and scroll through the results rather than entering “salmon” or “trout” to find images of fish. The other way to search is to open the advanced search settings in which you can choose a collection to browse through.

Applications for Education
My first thought about this collection was that it could be another place for students to look for images to use in presentations that they create. As I spent more time exploring the collection I realized that there are many images of cultural artifacts and images of archeological artifacts that could be useful as instructional aids in history and art history courses.

H/T to Open Culture.