NEW SOURCE OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Abandoning the Jeannette

from the collection of the Fisheries-Oceanography Library of the University of Washington


 Another image of the Jeannette in better days
USS JEANNETTE, U.S.Navy Photo PD 


 If you are a blogger or other wise maintain a marine related website you probably face the same issues daily that we face relative to illustrations. We have very little budget for the purchase of illustrations or for exhaustive copy right searches. We do our best to perform a due diligence search to assure that every illustration that we use is either in the public domain, or otherwise licensed for the use as we intend, and properly credited. Unfortunately there is a lot of playing fast and loose on the internet with copyrights. 

 This makes things especially difficult in terms of images because it is almost impossible to research an image if you have no title or author. So even a typical "due diligence" search can end up with an online publication inadvertently publishing copyrighted material, or misidentifying images, or inaccurately crediting them. Here at AAB we are always willing to retract images, correct inaccurate credits, publish apologies, and link to the claimed owner in the event of any mistaken use of copyrighted material. So far we haven't had to do any of those things. However, we don't suppose for a minute in the present Internet culture of intellectual property protection that our "fair usage" judgement approaches anything like infallibility. We can only really control our intent and attitude and our intent and attitude is to respect intellectual property law. So you can see why we are always excited to discover new sources of maritime images in the public domain. 

 We make wide usage of Federal Government photography from the Navy, Coast Guard, NOAA, and the Corps of Engineers. We also make wide usage of the Library of Congress. But we are forced too often, given the variety of maritime subjects we cover, to resort to internet searches. This always subjects us to the potential for second hand error. So you can understand why we are always excited to discover a reliable source of public domain maritime imagery. Since our mission is to help everyone find the maritime information that they need we provide links to other maritime information blogs and web sites, and we feel a keen interest in helping everyone who posts reliable maritime related information to the Internet in improving their web site or blog. So we are very happy to share our recent discovery of the FRESH WATER AND MARINE IMAGE BANK of the Fisheries -Oceanography Library of the University of Washington. https://content-dev.lib.washington.edu/fishweb/index.html

 This is a vast bank of older images nearly always outside of copy right due to copy right expiration. The library has been meticulous about identifying artist or photographer and other known information concerning origin. The images include photos of paintings, drawings, and illustrations from old publications as well as photos of all sorts of marine life, ships, boats, amphibians, reptiles, coasts, seascapes, nineteen subject categories in all from A to W. The Fresh Water and Marine Image Bank of Washington University   don't give up your search for a free image without searching here.