Digital projects let us leverage media in all kinds of interesting ways, and the internet offers us an overwhelming amount of media items to choose from. But when creating digital projects, it’s important to make sure you actually have permission to use that media. Here are some good resources for finding media that’s free to use and how to cite your media sources.
Definitions
- Public Domain: The public domain describes content that doesn’t have any copyright or licensing restrictions on it. Usually, this is a matter of age, but creators can choose to declare their items public domain, and many governments will also place all of their content in the public domain.
- Creative Commons: Creative Commons is a suite of licenses that make content free to use with optional restrictions. You’ll often see Creative Commons licenses as a series of abbreviations, like this: CC BY-ND-SA. Here’s what those abbreviations stand for:
- BY (authorship): You can use the content, but only if you include an attribution to the original creator.
- NC (non-commercial): You can’t sell what you make using the content.
- ND (non-derivative): You can use it, but you can’t alter it or create derivative works.
- SA (share-alike): You must apply the same license to whatever you create with the content that was on the original content itself.
- Copyright: Copyright is a more restrictive form of licensing and is subject to country-specific laws. While there are exceptions to copyright (see Fair Use below), you should start by looking for free to use content.
- Open Access: Open access works are, as their name suggests, free to access! But they’re not necessarily free to reuse. They’re still protected by copyright.
- Fair Use: The doctrine of fair use provides for exceptions to copyright, allowing people to reuse copyrighted works in limited ways. Academic work often falls under fair use, as does parody or satire. But figuring out if fair use applies can be complicated. Check out this guide to fair use to see if your project might qualify.
- Open Source: Software and data are subject to licensing restrictions, too. Open source describes technical products where the code (the “source”) is open and freely available to reuse. There are a variety of open source licenses, including MIT and Apache.
Citations
Whatever the license of your media, you should always cite it, just like you would a textual source. Sometimes it’s hard to know how to do that when you’re writing on a platform like WordPress that doesn’t work the same as Word or Google Docs. Here are some strategies. Your professor may have preferences or a required citation style, so make sure you check your assignment guidelines before deciding.
- Hyperlinks: The simplest and most bare-bones citation mechanism for online writing is hyperlinks. If you’re referencing a source online, sometimes the most effective way to draw your reader’s attention to it is to simply link to the source in the sentence.
- Pros: Quick and easy; lets you target your citation to a particular phrase or word that draws on your source; doesn’t disrupt your reader’s flow
- Cons: Doesn’t include full citation info; if the link breaks, your citation’s gone; sometimes you’re engaging more deeply with a source than a single link would suggest
- Parenthetical citations: You can do parenthetical citations just like you would in a traditional essay. Just include a bibliography with full citations at the end and include parenthetical references throughout the piece.
- Pros: Full references available on the same page as your writing; strikes a balance between providing enough info and not distracting your reader
- Cons: Parentheticals can make your writing seem more formal — not necessarily bad, but not always the tone you’re trying to strike online
- Footnotes: You can do footnotes online too, although they work a little differently because you have to insert them manually. The simple way to do that is to insert numbers in your text and add the references at the end. The more complex way is to turn those into jump links.(1) You can create a jump link by selecting the text you want to link to and assigning it an anchor. Then select the text of the footnote reference in your body text and hyperlink it, using a # and then the anchor you assigned to the note. So if you gave your note the anchor note1, your hyperlink would be #note1.
- Pros: creates easy linkages between content and citations; allows you to use explanatory notes as well as citations
- Cons: by far the most time-consuming and labor-intensive of the citation methods
Places to find free-to-use media
The easiest place to start when looking for free-to-use media is Google Images. Not everything you find there will be free to use! But you can use the search tools to filter for Creative Commons licenses.
Here are some other good places to look:
- New York Public Library Public Domain Images: Images from the NYPL’s digital collections that are free to use, organized by theme
- Library of Congress Free to Use and Reuse Sets: Items from the Library of Congress’s collections that are free to use, organized by theme
- OpenVerse: Archive of public domain and creative commons-licensed images and audio
- BBC Sound Effects: Sound effect audio clips from recordings done on BBC Radio (historic and contemporary); free to use for non-commercial
- Flickr: Like Google Images, Flickr isn’t always free to use but has filters that can help you find Creative Commons-licensed content
(1) A jump link is a link internal to a page. When you click on it, it moves you to a specific anchor on the page.