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Study Skills

Biological Sciences Libraries Research Skills Series: How to give great presentations

Image resources

We talk a lot in our live session about good images for your presentation. So where do you find them? We have some suggestions.

N.B. Always check the licence requirements before reusing anything

Stock images

Wikimedia Commons

commons.wikimedia.org

Wikimedia Commons contains over 55 million freely usable media files under a variety of licences.

Unsplash

unsplash.com

Half a million stock photographs published under a CC0 licence.

Flickr

www.flickr.com/

A community for sharing photographic images, with varying licences.

Pixabay

pixabay.com/

A collection of over 1.6 million royalty free stock photos and videos all published under a CC0 licence.

Openverse (Creative Commons Search)

wordpress.org/openverse

Openverse is a image search engine looking at content that is either available under a Creative Commons license or public domain.

U.S. Government Image Collections

Given the huge number of U.S. Government sites dedicated to image collection, they warranted a small list of their own. For a fuller account of U.S. Government image collections, try this list from the Library of Congress.

History of Medicine

www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/ihm

Images from the History of Medicine (IHM) are from the historical collections of the U.S. National Library of Medicine. Here you'll find image files of a wide variety of visual media including fine art, photographs, engravings, and posters that illustrate the social and historical aspects of medicine dating from the 15th to 21st century.

Public Health Image Library

phil.cdc.gov/default.aspx

A catalogue of images from the Center for Disease Control. Use by public health professionals, the media, laboratory scientists, educators, students, and the worldwide public for reference, teaching and presentations is encouraged.

Image Gallery Gateway

public.ornl.gov/site/gallery/default.cfm

Images from the Genomic Science program and other U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Biological and Environmental Research (BER) programs. Also includes archived images from the Human Genome Project and Microbial Genomics.

Scientific Image Collections

Wellcome Collection

wellcomecollection.org/works

Find thousands of Creative Commons licensed images from historical library materials and museum objects to contemporary digital photographs.

Biodiversity Heritage Library

www.biodiversitylibrary.org

The Biodiversity Heritage Library contains text and image records on a wide range of topics in the life sciences. The Biodiversity Heritage Library Flickr pages includes some excellent images.

World Register of Marine Species

www.marinespecies.org/photogallery.php

As well as an authoritative and comprehensive list of names of marine organisms, the World Register of Marine

Species (WoRMS) provides images of marine life. Images are by default open-access under the terms of the CC BY-NC-SA license, unless stated otherwise.

History of Science

Geograph Britain and Ireland

www.geograph.org.uk

The Geograph Britain and Ireland project aims to collect geographically representative photographs and information for every square kilometre of Great Britain and Ireland under Creative Commons licence.

Anatomy and Physiology Image Bank

cbs.umn.edu/jensen/image-bank

This collection of images is from The Sourcebook of Medical Illustration (The Parthenon Publishing Group, P. Cull, ed., 1989). The images are “copyright-free as long as they are used for educational purposes.”

Science Fair Project Pictures

www.thoughtco.com/science-fair-project-picture-gallery-4123138

A small collection (just 74 in total) of public domain images suited for use in science projects.

Produced with thanks to Laura Ennis (Edinburgh Napier University) and members of the LIS-SCITECH mailing list.

Accessibility and design

Adobe Color

Excellent colour wheel with visualisations of what certain colours look like for different types of colour blindness to help make your colour palette accessible.

PowerPoint

Some advice from University of Colorado, Boulder on how to make PowerPoint presentations accessible.

Canva

Free online design tool with templates and great visuals. Can be used to make graphs and charts for your presentation.

Book a consultation 

Need to talk to someone about your research?

Email the Biological Sciences Libraries Team to set up a time that fits your needs: sbslibraries@lib.cam.ac.uk

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