whencyclopedia:

Behind the Scenes: Acquiring Images for the Encyclopedia

IMAGES are an obviously important aspect of a modern encyclopedia and, for this reason, our editors - both full-time and volunteer, dedicate quite a lot of their time to search for, upload, and describe images to illustrate WHE’s articles. We tend to publish two new articles every day and a text of around 3,000 words requires at least six images, both to help the reader visualise aspects of the subject and also to make the webpage visually appealing and not simply present a wall of text. 

The title image of an article is particularly important in enticing people to read the text, especially so on Social Media posts but also as a thumbnail preview on the encyclopedia itself. We need images of a sufficient resolution and our editors must bear in mind that a landscape format typically works better than a vertical one, and that posts on places like Facebook and Twitter tend to crop images at the top and bottom. This latter consideration, if neglected, can lead to readers seeing the midriff of a statue instead of the face, or a stretch of brilliant blue sky but not the monument beneath it. We also like to choose images that reflect a monument or artefact in natural conditions. A night shot of the Colosseum can look wonderful but it is not necessarily helpful to someone who wants to see the different architectural orders used in each level of the amphitheatre.    

The encyclopedia really has two ways of acquiring images. One is for editors to search the internet to find good-quality images that can be legally republished. Those two requirements are not quite as easy as they sound. Many of the most striking images we come across cannot be used because photographers have copyrighted them and they cannot be republished for any purpose without paying a fee, a fee which WHE cannot really afford given the number of images we require each week for new content. We would also much prefer to publish images that can be reused by readers provided they are not for commercial use. This allows teachers and students to freely use our images in class or for homework and assignments without any problems. 

Fortunately, as a registered non-profit organisation and educational website, we can legally republish images that many other websites cannot. This is particularly true for museum websites. Being able to republish high-quality images from, say, the British Museum, London or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York is a great help to our work. These sites have the additional advantage that their image descriptions are very informative and reliable.    

A second way to acquire images is to receive them from volunteer photographers and our own staff. Some of our volunteers travel extensively and they are a great source of images of unusual places. Our own staff, naturally, have a strong passion for history and in their free-time and holidays, many members of the WHE team take photographs of archaeological sites, buildings, and museum artefacts that can be useful for the encyclopedia.

The advantage of having a photographer who knows their history is that we get very useful images that can be difficult to otherwise acquire. Finding a free-to-use image of the Parthenon on the web is not very difficult but finding images of rare objects like a Roman key, Egyptian comb, or Korean roof tile is a whole different challenge. As the encyclopedia publishes many articles on daily life topics such as food, clothing, entertainments and so on, finding suitable images for these texts can be a challenge. Often, the artefacts we need to illustrate these kinds of subjects are the ones that most people pass over in a museum and so they rarely appear on the internet. Consequently, having photographers upload these kinds of images not only helps our editors but also helps differentiate WHE from other history websites. We hope you the readers enjoy looking at the images we publish!  

Photos by: Diliff, Jan van der Crabben and Carole Raddato.