The Commons on Flickr is a collection of historic public domain photographs from a variety of institutions from around the globe, including the Library of Congress, National Galleries of Scotland and George Eastman House.

Marion McNealy shares some of her favorites from this collection from around the world.

Have  fun finding favorites of your own and exploring this interesting look at the past!

This month we feature a great research site: Wikimedia Commons. It's so much more than a place to host pictures for a Wikipedia entry!

We'll show you how to use the site, demonstrating its vast scope, giving you some in-roads and showing you where to start when you're looking for ideas or references. No longer will you need to stare at a blank search box, wondering where to begin!

I got into historical costume by admiring movie costumes. I was delighted to find, a little later, that there were people who'd written books on how to make those costumes, how to recreate them accurately, and I was most impressed of all when I realised that the clothes and the patterns have been, in some cases, preserved for us to enjoy centuries later.

A little later still, when I first got on the Internet in 1996, I spent some very late nights in my University's computer labs salivating over the websites of antique clothing dealers like Karen Augusta...

You may remember reading in January's blog that Katherine Caron-Greig was in Paris for the New Year, happily photographing some of the best paintings in the Louvre. Such was our jealousy that it seems only right to feature the Louvre as our Website of the Month for February!

I was once told how a woman vowed to visit every single work of art in the famous Paris museum; it took her five full days to see it all. The Musée du Louvre houses 35,000 works of art drawn from eight departments, displayed in over 60,000 square meters of exhibition space dedicated to the permanent collections. The website encourages the visitor to "explore the works on display, taking a thematic or cross-departmental approach," but on such a vast site, this can be daunting! To get you started, we've picked out a few highlights for you...

This month, you may watch in amusement as I wrangle with a subject I know very little about.

If you're as briefly acquainted with Tudor and Elizabethan costume as I am, prepare for a treat as we "ooh" and "aah" together over a new and wonderful branch of costume. Meanwhile, if this is your thang, you may alternatively watch in the aforementioned amusement and then go off to our Website of the Month in informed adoration of your very favourite thing.