Time/Life Images on Google Image Search

Back in November, Google launched a new photo archive of images from Life Magazine. This collection has photos and etchings prodcued and owned by Life Magazine dating all the way back to the 1750s.

http://images.google.com/hosted/life

You can totally get lost in here! — Jill

On Wikipedia . . .

I promised my next post would be on Wikipedia, which I reneged on to post about some hot blogs.    Here, as promised, is a post about Wikipedia.

I love Wikipedia.  I think most librarians love Wikipedia.  It’s got a zillion different articles on a zillion different things.  Because it is online and freely updated, it will have a complete listing of all of Donald Trump’s children before a print encyclopedia.  Editors of Wikipedia post wonderful photographs and pictures all over the site so most articles have a picture to go with them.  Some of the articles go into lots of details and they are hyperlinked to one another so it’s easy to click from one article to another related article.  Much easier than flipping pages for sure.  Wikipedia is a wonderful source and I have a few words of wisdom for users.

Things Wikipedia is great for:

• Fair-use pictures and photographs.  The editors of Wikipeadia are pretty diligent about making sure all the images are “fair-use.”  That means you can use them without some artist hunting you down for royaly money.  The images have explanations of why Wikipedia thinks it is fair-use.
• Quick reference, especially of fast-changing events.

Things Wikipedia is not so great for:

• Specialized articles and reference.  For example, if you are writing a school paper on dancing and religion, the Encyclopedia of Religion on the second floor of the Main Library is a better option.
• Reference for papers and school projects.  MOST of the time, Wikipedia is correct.  You will occasionally get an article when it has been hit by a prankster (my personal favorite was finding an article on World War II that had been edited to make it politically correct, i.e. calling the nuclear bomb “Obese Gentleman” instead of “Fat Boy”).  To be safe, and to make your teacher happy, double check your information in a print encyclopedia.  If you don’t want to come to the library and use one of ours, call the reference desk (560-0110) and ask how to get access to encyclopedias from home through NCLive and Credo.

I hope this helps as you use Wikipedia.  Remember, it’s always good to have more than one source for factual information.  Mistakes and typos do happen. — Jennifer