There’s plenty of excitement over open source and Creative Commons-released works. And for a long time now, there have been royalty-free contents from commercial and “amateur” providers. The question then is: What’s actually out there for faculty use? Several recent endeavors brought this challenge to clearer light.

Where?

So first, the resources. Wikipedia has plenty of sources released under Creative Commons copyright or fully released into the public domain. I’ve found quite a few cool images on their site. Public US government sites that have a public educational component also offer many images and well vetted information for use in the public domain. Then, there are topic-specific open-source repositories as well. Various universities have offered courseware in open forums to “share the wealth” of the learning.

In a sense, if one were to take a Darwinian interpretation, such generosity may return in branding cachet, in good will, and in the sense of noblesse oblige from some elite universities.

There are “amateur”-created resources of varying quality (and often without clear provenance).

Gleaning for Digital Imagery for Academic Use

No matter what the rationale for the initial sharing, I’ve been on a few digital image treasure hunts of late…in dietetics, livestock forage, rumen metabolism, “accessibility in immersive spaces,” and other areas and topics. Did I find huge loads of usable contents? Did I find contents applicable to the learning? Was the quality of the imagery good (high-res) enough for reproduction and other uses?

Actually, no surprise here, but no. It does seem like that anything of deep and abiding value is kept protectively. Or the images are so embedded into a case or learning context that the transferability is low. It may well be that the unique captures for micrographs or particular models may be so unique that only limited places may engage in these captures, and there’s really little incentive to share. Some of the images I found would pixellate into nothingness.

The toughest part was the inability to track the provenance of the information. A prof and I tracked one image back to a number of different sites, all of which named this same image different names…and not one of the site owners had any accurate citation that we could use to track the copyright holder. Even more concerning was that there was often more to find in commercial and semi-commercial sites than higher education-based ones.

The limited nature of these separate searches probably reflected on the results. Anyone out there have better suggestions? Approaches?