Digital Images in Education: Realising the Vision

The advent of digital photography and electronic storage media has led to a worldwide proliferation of digital images. It is now extremely simple to create, store, manipulate and distribute images electronically.

Although this provides clear benefits, particularly in the field of education, it also brings a number of headaches to do with questions of copyright, indexing and archiving, among others. All these stand in the way of the “vision” in the book’s title: to provide the UK education community with “long-term access to the digital image resources that it needs, in a variety of convenient, flexible and easy-to-use ways”.

To address the issue of how to bring this about, JISC set up an images working group, which consulted a variety of groups already working in the area. Digital Images in Education is the result of those consultations.

Each chapter concentrates on a different issue, such as copyright, consent (in the case of clinical images) and archiving. It quickly becomes apparent that these issues are often complex and hard to resolve. As the authors of chapter 2, The Digital Image Landscape, put it, in a discussion on copyright: “There are those who argue that sustainability can only be achieved through commerce that enables creators and collection managers to ‘make a living’, while others maintain that sustainability must be built on collegiality and the gift economy.”

Many of the problems come together in the chapter on arts education, which discusses the difficulty of “how lecturers, students, librarians et al will be able to access the images they need in light of the potential demise of the traditional slide library”. The problems include the lack of a usable structure for finding images, the difficulty in pooling digital image resources, and the lack of common standards.

Although there are no easy answers to the problems, the book does an excellent job of identifying the contentious areas and proposing possible solu tions. With its proliferation of acronyms, Digital Images may not be a light read, but it’s an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the issue.

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