All of the images here are in the public domain in the USA, with sources as indicated.
Often the originals are too large to present online. Click (or right-click to download) on each image for a larger (if not as large as possible) version.
The images which serve as links to other documents on this site are described on the "About the Images" pages for those linked documents.
This image depicts a portion of a card catalog at the Library of Congress. This is of course a catalog, not an index, but the two are so closely related that if you were to hand anyone in the 20th century one of the pieces of paper on which these catalog entries were made they would call it an "index card."
This image is cropped from a photograph taken in the winter of 1942 by John Collier for the Farm Security Administration (later the Office of War Information). It is from the US Library of Congress' Prints and Photographs division, where it is call number LC-USW3-000381-C [P&P], with the permanent URL: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/owi2001002670 It's title in their catalog is "Jewal Mazique [i.e. Jewel] cataloging in the Library of Congress". The icon above links to a 1024 pixel wide reduction of the entire original image. Here is the full resolution original image, converted losslessly from TIFF to PNG: loc-pp-fsa-owi2001002670-card-catalog.png
