This month’s blog post was contributed by Kayla Reed, Discovery, Systems and Digital Strategy Librarian at Grinnell College.
Creating and adapting open educational resources is no small task! One thing that can make it easier is finding openly sourced visuals. Finding materials that all mesh under one Creative Commons License can feel intimidating, but keeping track of your resources and opting for open or original content can lighten the load.
Using visual materials that have open licenses can help you:
- Avoid copyright infringement
- Avoid having to pay to use materials
- Can allow modifications depending on the license
Visuals can make a big difference in learning materials.
How to find openly licensed visuals
You can check museum websites for images of art! Many will have images that are free to use.
- National Gallery of Art: More then 60,000 images of artwork in the National Gallery’s collections are available open access for both commercial and non-commercial use.
- Metropolitan Museum of Art: Over 492,000 images of public domain artworks are available for free and unrestricted use.
Other open projects help create materials specifically for incorporation into open projects, such as the Indigenous Education Stock Photos Project and the Disabled and Here Collection!
- Indigenous Education Stock Photos: Free to use photos of indigenous students and educators, available under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
- Disabled and Here Stock Photo Collection: A disability-led effort to provide free and inclusive stock photos from the perspective of disabled Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC).
There are sites for more general images as well, some of which pull together openly licensed images from several disparate sources.
- Openverse: A metasearch of CC-licensed images found across Flickr, Wikimedia, and other popular image sites, managed by Creative Commons.
- Wikimedia Commons: A collection of openly licensed images shared for use on the Wikimedia platform.
- Public Domain Image Archive: A collection of over 11,000 public domain photos and illustrations which are free to use and share.
These materials can elevate your work and make copyright compliance easy.
Are there other sources not mentioned here? Comment below!