TENDENCY OF STUDENT LIFE, taken from: N.S. Shaler, THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, London : Sampson, Low and Marston, 1894, p. 582. Image courtesy of the British Library. CLICK TO ENLARGE.

The British Library and the Wellcome Trust have recently digitized and made available thousands of Public Domain (copyright-expired) images to be downloaded and re-used by the public.

The British Library photostream on Flickr contains images mainly taken from books in the BL’s collections, covering a wide variety of subjects.  The records for the images include links to the catalogue-records of the books that they are from, and in some cases even to .pdf files of entire books.  Despite owning the copyright in the digitized versions of these images, the BL has made many of them available without formal licences.  However, the BL does request that the users of its Flickr images follow certain principles.

The Wellcome Images collection has mainly to do with the history and anthropology of medicine and the biological sciences (it includes a section on sports and exercise).  The images are available in different formats: most images have formats (often .jpg) that are freely available for re-use under a Creative Commons licence.

More guidance about finding re-usable images online is available here.

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Google Images has introduced a new feature that allows you to find images that you can re-use without infringing other people’s copyright.

Go to Google Images (http://images.google.co.uk/), and search for what you are interested in.  We’ll do a search for ‘Ben Nevis’ (Figure 1 – click on the Figure to see the details).

Figure 1. © Google, 2014.

When the results appear, click on the ‘Search tools’ button, and you will get a set of drop down menus.  You can use the ‘Usage Rights’ menu to filter the results according to what permissions have been granted for their re-use.  We’ll select images that have simply been ‘labeled for reuse’ (Figure 2 – click on the Figure to see the details).

Figure 2. © Google, 2014.

The results on the screen will change: the ones that you may not re-use should have been filtered out.  You can now select one that you like the look of (Figure 3) and go to the website where it has been uploaded.

Figure 3. © Google, 2014, and John Dyason, 2006. Reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/).

Always check on the original website that you really are allowed to re-use the picture that you want.  This example says clearly that it has been issued for re-use under a Creative Commons licence, and provides a link to that licence (Figure 4 – click on the Figure to see the details).

Figure 4. © Geograph, 2014, and John Dyason, 2006. Reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/).

You can find more information about Creative Commons licences here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/.

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