I'm constantly trying to find great resources for images to use academically. Images are a must for digital storytelling and presentations. All too often I see students go straight for Google Images with little or no thought about ethical use of someone else's image or the owner's Copyright policy. And you're not the only one! Too many of us are guilty of right-clicking-and-downloading without any notice of proper image usage. I myself try to make Creative Commons my go-to source for images and credit accordingly, but CC can fall short if the user-uploaded images aren't exactly what I had in mind. But the digital collection of online images has just gotten a whole lot better with the availability of these great new resources! Open access sure is exciting! American Museum of Natural History Special Collections Image Database What started as a project intended to digitize 1,000 photographs and rare book illustrations within the American Museum of Natural History's collection has blossomed into a full-on image database with over 7,000 images and growing. According to the museum, photos will date back to 19th century scientific expeditions. The 7,000 photos are merely a sliver of the museum's collection (about 1%!) so I expect this archive to grow dramatically over time. Click here to view the collections on the homepage or begin a search. Metropolitan Museum of Art Over 400,000 high resolution images from the MoMa's world-renowned art collection are now available in digital format, announced the museum director and CEO Thomas P. Campbell two weeks ago. The images are available for download directly from the website given that they are used noncommercially. The number of images will increase regularly as the museum works towards digitizing their entire encyclopedia collection of art. Click here to view the collection and test different search strategies. Getty Images New Embed Tool And that's not all. You know all of those often terribly generic stock photos that are used alongside news articles or blog posts when the author didn't bother to take their own photos? Just about every stock photo is owned by Getty, and users have always had to pay to access Getty's image catalog. Not anymore! As long as you are using Getty's images noncommercially (as in not making money off it), you now have the ability to directly embed a Getty image player onto your webpage or presentation, with full copyright information included automatically with a link to the full licensing page. So how many photos are we talking here? 35 million. The link to a search of all embedded images is here. All this news came directly from one of my favorite info literacy blogs, The Never Ending Search. Will you be exploring any of the new free, open source digital collections above? For help using these sources or finding the right place to search for images, see me!
-Ms. McCall
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