With major revelations in the Shepard Fairey copyright case hitting the news, image citation and copyright has been on my mind lately. Maybe I’m a little over-sensitive because I hold a degree in art history, but failure to properly cite images has always been a pet peeve of mine. I cringe when I see students pulling photos and diagrams straight from a Google image search without bothering to find out the source of the image or credit its creator in any way.
But here’s my sad little secret: half the time I’m just as confused as my students when it comes to properly citing.
At a recent conference I was excited about a session on copyright for school librarians, but what looked like a solid overview was quickly derailed by very specific audience questions, so we never even got to the slide on images. What’s a well-meaning librarian to do?
There’s Creative Commons, of course, which I think offers very clear explanations of copyright and terms of use–and is a great place to send teens when they want to find images. If you want cover images for your library blog (and who doesn’t?) you can easily obtain a developer key from LibraryThing and pretty much use CoverThing to your heart’s content.
But what about when you’ve found the absolutely perfect image online, and you’re not sure if you can use it?
This morning I’ve been hunting for propaganda images for a US History class coming into the library this week, and I came across a fantastic slide show from Life Magazine. I immediately tried to track down citation information–I think it’s irresponsible to point my students to resources without knowing if or how they can be cited–but what I found was a pretty dense terms of use page geared toward commercial reproduction.
Luckily for me, Getty Images offers free online chat with their licensing experts. (Hi, Brad!) I quickly learned that images can be cited by photographer/artist and Getty Images, and that printing costs money–unless you print just the preview image with a Getty watermark, which is free.
Success! I found a great resource for my students, I got over my fear of feeling dumb and asked someone for help, and now I have very clear image use and citation guidelines for Getty Images–not to mention a very positive customer service experience online.
What’s your favorite story about copyright or a resource you love for images online?
