This news seems pretty neat and, instead of re-inventing the wheel, I’m just going to quote from a Read Write Web post (and I’d encourage you to read their entire piece:

Yale University has one of the larger collections of art, objects and documents of any organization in the U.S. Now, digital images and audio files of the collection are free to access by anyone in the world online, according to an announcement by the university’s communications office.

Yale Digital Commons has debuted with just under 260,000 images. The idea is to encompass the whole of the university’s collections in time.

Here’s the main link to Yale Digital Commons.

The real interesting part of this is that the images are being released with what appear to be absolutely no licensing requirements. Yale says:

“In a departure from established convention, no license will be required for the transmission of the images and no limitations will be imposed on their use….”

I’m adding it to The Best Online Sources For Images.