Think your paper or presentation needs a picture or two? You may find your topic easier to discuss visually rather than with words. But how do you find the right image?
Below are a few databases of images to help you get started on your search.
The library subscribes to ArtStor, a powerful database that can link you to high quality reproductions of artworks from all over the world.
Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online, similarly, harvests digitized images from the collections of the Library of Congress.
Creative Commons Search crawls the internet for public domain or otherwise openly licensed images.
Wikimedia Commons, like Creative Commons Search, allows you to search a database of freely licensed and public domain images and media content.
A Google Image search will return everything that a regular Google search returns, but narrowed down to the images seen on the pages Google indexes.
Reusing an image for any purpose without first compensating the image creator must be done within the confines of fair use.
The four statutory factors of fair use are:
Fortunately, all images you borrow for use in a research context fall under the first statutory factor, given that they're used for educational purposes.
However, do remember that even images you borrow must be cited in your paper, and there's specific rules about how to do that. Here's an example of how to cite an image in MLA format, 8th Edition:
