Want some good quality images, or videos, or other digital
media to enhance your presentations and essays? Look no further. Here are some
top places to find free stuff you can use for educational purposes, without
breaking any copyright laws…
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| Creative Commons image from Cobalt123; hover over to get the Flickr URL |
Images
There are loads of high quality images available via
Creative Commons (or CC) copyright licences. There are various versions of the
Creative Commons licence (such as being limited to non-commercial use, for
example), but the one thing all of them have in common is that you can use
something, without paying for it, as long as you correctly attribute it to its
creator. In other words, if you use a picture in an essay, put a caption
underneath it saying “Image by [name here], available via Creative Commons.”
Good places to look for images:
·
Flickr
has hundreds of thousands of them – here’s the screen to start from: www.flickr.com/creativecommons/
·
Blue
Mountains is a site which seems to filter out a lot of the dross and just
find higher-quality Flickr CC images: flickrcc.bluemountains.net/flickrCC/index.php
·
Compfight
is a great search engine for high quality images – just make sure you select
the ‘Creative Commons’ option down the left-hand side:
· For a different selection of really
interesting and arty pictures, try Art Stor.
You’ll need to do it from campus so the site knows you are from York – it’s
something we’ve paid for on your behalf. Or you can search the Multicolor Search Engine for images by colour, if you really need something exact to match the colour scheme of your presentation...
Sound
It’s harder to weave sound into academic work, but in case
you can think of a way, try the British Library Archival Sound Recordings at http://sounds.bl.uk/
Video
Many YouTube videos (www.youtube.com)
are available under Creative Commons licences (although you need to be careful
that it is definitely the original copyright-holder who has granted this –
someone uploading a pirated copy of Titanic
and making it available via Creative Commons doesn’t mean it’s actually copyright-free…).
Also worth a look is Film and Sound Online – film and video
free for use in research and education: http://www.filmandsound.ac.uk/
Further reading
Have a look at JISC’s
Little Guide to Finding Digital Media Resources (PDF). Also this wiki lists
a huge array of sites which have copyright-free or Creative Commons material of
all sorts: http://copyrightfriendly.wikispaces.com/.
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