The Centre des Monuments Nationaux conserves, restores, and manages nearly 100 national monuments, opening up these sites of social, cultural, and architectural history for public consumption. The website uses a geographic search feature to locate pages devoted to the Pantheon, Tours Cathedral, the house of George Sand, and many more. Monument pages include photographs and videos, points of historical interests, details about tours and other activities on site, and a list of literature specific to the building.

Rhizome is an online community and publication  “dedicated to the creation, presentation, preservation, and critique of emerging artistic practices that engage technology.” The site includes contemporary examples of works investigating the intersection of art, technology and culture, with an archive dating back to the early 1990s.

Earthweek is a weekly newsource providing information about innovations and new discoveries in the earth science. This unique site is comprehensive, focusing on biological, geographical, geological, and meteorological topics that effect not only our daily life but our continued cultural and evolutionary existence. Climate change and issues of sustainability are paramount, though stories about the increasing rate of birth defects in Iraq following the 2003 invasion and pigeons with a pension for good art creep in too. The interactive map located on the site’s home page uses geography to links to Earthweek’s most current stories while providing a geographical context.

Shangri-la Botanical Gardens and Nature Center, Orange, Texas, Photo Courtesy of Hester + Hardaway Photography

The American Institute of Architects Committee on the Environment (COTE) invites electronic submission of built projects and chose ten that represent the most innovative examples of green building. The website consists of a search-able database with detailed information about each building’s design process, cost, land use,  water conservation, energy use, materials, and LEED ratings.

The American Society of Civil Engineers Database provides access to over 100,000 bibliographic and abstracted records from 1970 to the present. The associated Research Library can search 73,000 full-text articles from ASCE journals and conference proceedings and will be adding over 4,000 new articles each year. Though a subscription is required, these resources offer unprecedented access to research materials in the various fields of civil engineering.

The App Garden on Flickr brings together all the “home grown” applications created with the Flickr API. API’s allow developers to write programs using public data – photos, video, tags, profiles or groups – that allow you to explore Flickr’s content in new and different ways.

Bildindex der Kunst und Architektur consists of around 2 million images of art and architecture located in Germany and throughout Europe. While Bildindex is a German-language site, it is navigable for the English speaker through interactive features that  provide information about the current location and history of the image object. The product of over 30 years of collection development, Bildindex hosts a wide range of image types (drawings, photographs, paintings, prints, plans) as well as special collections and continues to grow by sponsoring further digitization projects.

The George Eastman House has created a wiki-style resource, Notes on Photographs, for students, historian, collectors, curators, conservators and archivists to facilitate deeper understanding of photographic techniques. With the rise in market value, lack of reference resources, and closing of chemical imagining plants,  there is a greater need than ever before to study and observe traditional photographs.

Inmagine is the world’s largest royalty-free stock photography site with over 3.5 million images from over 100 best-selling collections. With images organized into galleries and categories, they are easy to search even without using Inmagines innovative search tools including Insight keyword search and Universal Search, a mechanism using geography and language detection to locate images. In addition, Inmagine offers a number of services including image enlargement and retouching.

The University of Chicago Center for the Art of East Asia is creating a database of Chinese handscroll paintings in a scrolling digital format. The Digital Scrolling Paintings Project aims to create a database that at once provides access to these rarely displayed artifacts while enabling a full investigation of the images and ideograms rendered.