Welcome to another Sourcing Series segment presented by the Data Literacy Program (DLP) of the Alexandria Archive Institute. In this article, we introduce some sources for (re)usable images based on our experiences finding visuals to use in our Digital Data Stories.
You may have noticed that our Data Stories have a lot of images. For example our book club Data Stories, like A Pun Goes Here: The AAI Reads Fiction Book Club, has DLP made visuals for each recommended book! Rather than reuse copyrighted images (like book covers) we found reusable visuals that fit the books we recommended and regularly incorporate images to illustrate important themes in our other Data Stories.
In fact, finding appropriate and reusable images is its own data and visual literacy exercise. We practiced our data literacy as we looked for works with appropriate licenses (such as those talked about in Introduction to Licenses). In addition, we considered how those images said or communicated something about the work itself, allowing us to practice our visual literacy.
However, there are tons of images on the internet! And an equal number that lack license or attribution information. While in our daily lives sharing memes with friends, this is probably ok, it’s not an appropriate practice in an academic, linked open data, or pedagogical context. Instead, for our Data Stories and articles we find images on Wikimedia Commons, the New York Public Library, and through subscriptions to the Noun Project and Adobe Stock that outline the legal reuse of those works.
For our work, our image sources fall into two broad categories. The first are free online sources that include explicit and clear licenses (like those from Creative Commons) that allow various types of sharing and modification. The second are paid online sources whose materials are available for (re)use through a regular subscription to their service. And because these sources are so rich, we’ll be writing individual articles about each in future Sourcing Series segments. In those, we’ll give brief summaries of those resources and how we’ve used them in our work. Then we’ll provide some examples of the cool images we’ve sourced from those places.
In the meantime, feel free to search Wikimedia Commons, the New York Public Library, the Noun Project, and Adobe Stock on your own to find good and potentially reusable images to include in your next project or presentation. (You can also search museum collections with help from this AAI video). But remember, any media (at least ones that aren’t public domain) should also come with proper attribution information. To learn more about that, check out our introductions to licenses and citation and attribution, and look out for more articles in our Sourcing Series soon.
Image Credits: The main header image is an adaptation of an Adobe Stock image that we use as a logo for the Data Literacy Program (DLP) with the added title for the series and the specific title related to this article. The image “Old Spanish Mission, New Smyrna, Fla.” by the Detroit Publishing Company from The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection of the New York Public Library and determined to be in the Public Domain.
