2007 CVC award report Alice Taylor West Los Angeles College Art 102: History of Western Art since the Renaissance April 22, 2007 Museums and other owners of artworks hold the rights to all reproductions of them, and publishers require documentation of the owner’s permission to publish photographs of art. Such permission theoretically extends to online teaching. The exception would be “fair use,” an educator’s right to reproduce copyrighted material for use in a single semester. Obviously, changing all the images in an art history course every semester is not practical. My goal this semester was to transit the images in my Art 102 site on ETUDES ng afrom "fair use" to copyright status. To this end, I undertook eight steps. I note my results below each step. 1) identify images for Art 102 available to me through my textbook publishers This proved the most fruitful approach. McGraw Hill, the publisher of my current textbook (Laurie Schneider Adams, Art Across Time), maintains an online database of images used in all its humanities textbooks, and this included most of the images I needed. Harcourt had provided instructors using another text with a CD of images including permission to post them on the web; this resource helped fill gaps in the McGraw Hill’ ImageVault. 2) write to museums and independent scholars for permissions to use their digital images from the web As I might have expected, only one independent scholar responded to my email with permission to use his image of Malevich’s Black Square in the context of a museum gallery. One museum responded, welcoming me to link to their site, but requesting that I not use frames which would recontextualize their images within my course. Other museums and scholars simply did not respond. Colleagues in libraries and museums who receive such requests have told me that they rarely have time to respond to them. I will continue to link to museum websites in my course, but remove framed images. 3) digitalize my own original slides Experiments with available scanners convinced me to save up for a slide scanner; the quality of slides scanned with typical office scanners designed to scan pages and books was not adequate for a course involving detailed visual analysis.
4) document the permissions I obtain My email archive contains one permission and one refusal. 5) document the source of each image and provide it in my course site. Once I have fully copyright-compliant images in my ETUDES ng site, I will place a file in the Resources section of my course noting the source of the images I have incorporated. 6) in Photoshop, adjust each image for optimal use by students on dial-up connections. The image capture feature of my Mac obviated the need to use Photoshop to create the small files I needed for ETUDES ng. 7) place the permitted images in the appropriate section of my course I have used the permitted McGraw Hill images in all the modules through module 8 and intend to continue replacing fair use images with the McGraw Hill as I move through the modules in the course of the semester. 8) relable each course element as "fair use" or "copyright-creative commons" I still cannot claim “copyright-creative commons" status for my revised modules, due to a technical problem. ETUDES ng can upload images directly from a PC, but not from a Mac. In order to incorporate my images, I currently have to place them on another website, and link to then in ETUDES ng. The photo hositng websites available to me are not password protected, so I am not in compliance with McGraw Hill’s requirements for using their data bank. I plan to burn the images I have created on my Mac onto a CD, and borrow a PC to upload them into my ETUDES ng course. So, for one final semester, I am still in “fair use” territory.