Finding Images

Yesterday I visited Robinson G. Jones School in Cleveland to introduce History Day to the students. One question that came up was where to find good images to use for a project. I thought this would be a great question to answer on the blog as there might be many of you out there asking yourself just the same thing. So here we go...

There are lots of great places to find images for History Day. One general tip though is to look for high resolution images. You don't want to include any image that is blurry or too small to see. Sometimes while searching you will find small pictures but you will want to enlarge them to print out for an exhibit or use in a documentary. If the image is low resolution, it will become blurry as it gets bigger. If you are using Google Images, look on the side and choose the Large size, possibly the Medium would work too. If you hover over an image you will see the resolution number (ie: 250 x 318). The bigger the number the higher the resolution.

Speaking of Google Images... yes, you can find images to use here but you need to know a couple things.

1. Do NOT cite Google!
The image does not live in the Google website. Google is a search engine and pulls from lots of different websites. If you find an image you like while doing a Google search, look at the URL where the image came from and go to that website and use it for the citation.

2. Evaluate websites images came from.
I'm sure your teachers tell you to use good, scholarly websites for research and the same is true for finding images. Look for websites ending in .gov, .org, .edu. For an image to be considered a primary source for your bibliography, it should be a digitized version of the original image. So, it should be a part of a digital collection from a museum, archive, library, etc.

Google tip- in the search box you can limit your search to certain websites. For example, if my topic was women's suffrage, in the search box I can type "women's suffrage site: .gov" By adding the site: .gov it will limit the search to only government websites. You can do the same with .edu or .org too. You can also search a specific website so for example, searching "women's suffrage site: loc.gov" is only going to search for materials on the Library of Congress website (loc.gov).

There are some other websites that can be helpful in finding images. Check them out:

Library of Congress: American Memory
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html

Library of Congress: Prints and Photograph Collection
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/
Once you do your search- choose the option "Larger Images Available Anywhere". This will limit the search results to just the digital copies that are higher resolution and not just small thumbnails.

Life Magazine: Your world in Pictures
http://www.life.com/

National Archives: Online Public Access
http://www.archives.gov/research/search/
If you go to the advanced search you can limit the search to just photographs if that is what you are looking for.

Smithsonian Institution
http://collections.si.edu/search/
Once you search along the left side you will see options to limit results to just images if you wish.



If you have any topics or questions you want to see answered on the History Day Expert blog, you can either leave a comment or email them to historyday@ohiohistory.org.