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how to do
For the purposes of an academic website, any non-trivial image that is not an original creation of the author constitutes a borrowed idea and should be attributed accordingly. There are two acceptable ways of achieving this:
- Provide a caption under the image itself, listing the author, title, and source of the image.
- Link the image itself to a separate page containing an enlarged version of the same image together with author, title, and source information. This technique is especially useful if there are interesting or important details in the image that are lost in reducing it to a smaller format.
Determining whether or not an image requires attribution will often be a matter of personal judgement. A useful rule of thumb might be this: if an image contributes materially to the ideas presented in the site, or a reader might reasonably wish to know the source of an image in order to pursue these ideas further, then it should be attributed.
According to this rule, the following types of image would require attribution:
- Any photograph, painting, or other work of art whose subject matter is connected to the topic of your site
- Any reproduction of primary source material, such as a page of an eighteenth-century book or newspaper
- Portraits of historical figures discussed in your site
- Reproductions of eighteenth-century drawings or caricatures
- A web-page background based on an eighteenth-century tapestry design, if the topic of the site has anything to do with design or the visual arts.
The following types of image, similarly would probably not require attribution:
- An image of an English flag used as a navigational button
- Freely available "clip art" icons
- A snapshot of yourself on the site's "Credits" page
- A background image that has nothing to do historically with the content of your site
If in doubt, please consult your instructor, or simply err on the side of caution and provide the attribution.
