Archaeology Image Bank

I’ve been sat on this for a while and when the launch is finally announced I forget to mention it.

The HEA’s Archaeology Image Bank is now open. It will eventually be an extensive collection of annotated images for use in teaching and research. My photos should also be available from Flickr under a CC BY-SA licence which is slightly more open than HEA’s terms. I have a few up there including this one of Stonehenge, which is listed at number three in the download chart. I’m not asking people to download it the hi-res version purely to boost my ego. You should download it because it’s a useful photo. And then download a second copy tomorrow to boost my ego. 😉 I appreciate the photos could be used by unpleasant people, but the sort of people I wouldn’t want using the photos are the sort of people who wouldn’t ask me or tell me about using them anyway. All a more stringent licence would do is deter people who might otherwise do interesting and imaginative stuff with them. There is the loss of commerical gain, but I don’t think I’m losing a substantial income by making the photos usable for free. You may call it pessimistic, but I think realistic is a better description.