"Like many major museums all over the world—including the National Gallery, the Rijksmuseum, The British Library, and over 200 others—the [Smithsonian's] Freer/Sackler [Galleries] has made its collection, all of it, available to view online. You can also download much of it. [...]

As Freer/Sackler director Julian Raby describes the initiative, “We strive to promote the love and study of Asian art, and the best way we can do so is to free our unmatched resources for inspiration, appreciation, academic study, and artistic creation.” There are, writes the galleries’ website, Bento, “thousands of works now ready for you to download, modify, and share for noncommercial purposes.” More than 40,000, to be fairly precise.

You can browse the collection to your heart’s content by “object type,” topic, name, place, date, or “on view.” Or you can conduct targeted searches for specific items. In addition to centuries of art from all over the far and near East, the collection includes a good deal of 19th century American art."

Direct link for the Freer & Sackler collection - http://www.asia.si.edu/collections/edan/default.cfm (hint: always "clear search", before browsing e.g. by name)

From the article:

"Some of the rarest and most fragile religious texts in the Vatican and Bodleian libraries, including ancient bibles and some of the oldest Hebrew manuscript and printed books, are being placed online in a joint project by the two great libraries, which will eventually create an online archive of 1.5m pages.

The website launched on Tuesday with funding from the Polonsky Foundation includes the first results of the four-year project, including the Bodleian's 1455 Gutenberg Bible, one of only 50 surviving copies of the first major book printed in the west with metal type.

The site will also host a growing collection of scholarly essays, and interviews with the Oxford and Vatican librarians, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, who said the digitisation was of huge international significance."