With NIGMS support through a Recovery Act grant, the American Society for Cell Biology has established The Cell: An Image Library. The resource is a freely accessible, easy-to-search, public repository of reviewed and annotated images, videos and animations of cells. The goal is to create a single place where scientists—as well as educators, students and the general public—can find images of cellular structures and processes. The library currently houses more than 3,600 representative images from different organisms and cell types. You can search for specific images or browse by a number of categories. You can use the library to:

• Locate historical and recent images to use in slide presentations or classroom lectures,
• Study how structures behave in a cell with the movies and animations,
• Compare cellular structures from different organisms,
• Generate new scientific questions based on observed characteristics, and
• Identify potential collaborators.

The curators continue to improve the site and to add images. Plans include future collections related to diseased cells. I encourage you to draw from the library and also to submit your own images. If you have feedback on the library, you can send it to the manager, David Orloff.