Research Guide: Locating and Citing Images

This guide offers basic suggestions for locating and using digital images in an educational setting, covered by Fair Use of U.S. copyright law. An excellent overview of copyright law and fair use is available through the Stanford University’s web site, http://fairuse.stanford.edu/

Locating and Citing Images

General Note

This guide offers basic suggestions for locating and citing images in an educational setting, covered by Fair Use of U.S. copyright law. An excellent overview of copyright law and fair use is available through the Stanford University’s web site, http://fairuse.stanford.edu/.

Questions? Contact Ask-a-Librarian at http://library.usc.edu.

How to Identify/Cite Images

Generally, images copied from elsewhere may be reproduced in faculty and student papers and projects as long as they are available to a limited audience in a course or a conference. Copied images may not be made available for the public at large, for any commercial purpose, including publishing, or for an indefinite period of time. In all cases, someone else’s images, like someone else’s ideas, words or music, need to be identified and cited. If a project is to be made public or published, then waivers or permissions from the copyright holder(s) of the image(s) must be obtained.

Use the following elements when identifying and citing an image, depending on the information available:

• Creator’s name;
• Title of the image;
• Institution where the image is held or owned;
• Material (photograph, oil and canvas, digital, etc.);
• Dimensions of the work;
• Date of online access;
• URL (website address where the image was found).

To check the size of an image found on the Internet, open it in a new browser window or view image properties by holding the mouse over it – this will display pixel dimensions. Images smaller than 500 px should not be used for presentations.

Authoritative Sources

These are sources which include not just images but also information about them, which can be used for citing, such as creator, title, image location, description, analysis, etc.

• Books
  Books are an important source for images, which have been well identified and described. To find books, search by topic in HOMER, the USC Libraries book catalog, by going to http://library.usc.edu.

• Journal Articles
  Like books, journals are a good source for images which have been well identified and described. To locate journal articles by topic, go to http://library.usc.edu. Select the Electronic Resources link, and go to the subject link in the right column. This will help you find the right database for your discipline. The databases will lead you to journal articles, which will either be available online or in print form.

• USC now subscribes to Illustrata: Natural Sciences the first in a series of CSA databases of searchable tables, figures, graphs, charts and other illustrations from the scholarly research and technical literature. You can find useful images now, regardless of the topic of the article in which the image is contained. All CSA databases provide citation output format.

• Institutional Image Databases
  Libraries, museums, and cultural organizations are compiling authoritative digital collections of images.

  Select USC Image Databases:

  • Digital Archives – http://library.usc.edu, is a strong collection in historic photographs of the Los Angeles area, which is expanding into other images, such as Medieval Monastic Matrix.
  • ARTSTOR – http://www.artstor.org, is an important collection of thousands of images of fine arts, architecture, and artifacts.
  • Illustrata – Natural Sciences indexes tables, figures, maps, graphs, charts and other images contained in scholarly articles.

• Commercial Sources
  Examples of commercial sites that have large image archives and manage reproduction rights are Corbis.com and Gettyimages.com.

(updated Oct. 07)

Common Internet Sources

Below is a short list of frequently used free Internet image sources that do not always give information about the image.

• The Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org) usually provides basic information about images in its articles, and often identifies the source.

• Google images (http://images.google.com) is a great source for images, but it does not always provide even basic identification information.

• Flickr.com, YouTube.com, and other services that allow individuals to post any image, include thousands of images. However, there is rarely any identification.

  rw/07/2007