ResearchBuzz

After watching major search engines develop way to search for Creative Commons images, it’s no surprise to discover that there’s a search engine dedicated exclusively to Creative Commons and public domain images. It’s called Sprixi and it’s available at http://www.sprixi.com/. What it finds is rather limited (at the moment it finds only items from Flickr and OpenClipArt as well as any images that are uploaded to Sprixi) its presentation is excellent.

The site has a basic keyword search; just enter a couple of words that describe what you’re looking for. I did a search for snow. Sprixi divides its search results into two panels: the first has thumbnails of the results and the second has a larger version of a chosen image, with even more data if you hold your mouse over the image.

Along with viewing the image, you have the option of specifying whether you think the option is a good result for your keyword search, which will help Sprixi give better results over time. If you click on the larger image in the right panel, you won’t get anything. But if you look at the bottom of the second panel, you’ll see there are direct links both to the image and to the Flickr user who uploaded the image. Beneath that you’ll see a notice of public domain or the picture’s Creative Commons license, as well as the original dimensions of the image.

If you like what you see here and find a picture you want to use, the next step is to click on the image, then click on the green “Use” link at the far right of the search results. You’ll see a screen that looks like this:

As you can see you’ll get a link to the image, an option to download the image (and when you download the image, credit/attribution information will be added to it) and details about the use license in plain English. (“you must give credit to the author / commercial use allowed …”)A “more options” link lets you download the image without the credits/attribution text, as well as get image HTML and credit text.

I really like the presentation of this search engine. The two panel results make it easy to browse results as well as provide feedback on the relevance of the images to the keywords. And the “Use” link makes it easy to get the images and the attribution and use information you need. Nicely done.

I have three concerns, however. The first is the name — I thought initially “Sprixi” might be hard to remember. But I never misspelled it once in this writeup, so maybe it’s all right. Next, the direct links to Flickr image pages do not open in a new browser window. This means a lot of flipping back and forth unless you can remember to consistently open interesting Flickr pages in a new window. And finally, Sprixi might get run over by the large general search engines offering much bigger pools of CC and public domain images. Hopefully the site will expand what’s available via this great search and presentation.

Google Books announced last week that it was opening up the Google Books site to authors and publishers who have made books available under Creative Commons licenses. As you can see from the additional information provided here, the books must be made fully browsable and downloadable from Google Books, which is good for us, the end user.

Unfortunately the ability to limit your search to just those items published under a CC license is not yet available at Google’s advanced search. (Google notes in its blog post that this will bean option that will become available as more publishers/authors make their books available this way.) You can narrow down your searches to those materials that provide access to full content only, which will help you find Creative Commons works.

One of the things I learned while I tried experimenting with this is that Google Books has added a LOT of magazine content — I don’t see talk about it much but it has. So you might want to narrow down your search results to just books as well.

55 Ways to Have Fun With Google is one of the Creative Commons books, and you can see its page at http://books.google.com/books?id=-XDkb3htVikC. Look on the lower-left corner for the book’s CC badge.

I’m looking forward to seeing a CC-specific search option once a critical mass of CC books have been added to Google Books’ database. I also hope that this will spur Google to start some kind of “Google CC”, one spot to search for CC-licensed books, images, Web pages, and maybe even more…

Creative Commons has announced the launch of DiscoverEd, a search engine of “open” educational resources. Open as in as having a CC or other license that makes them more available for use. DiscoverEd is available in beta at http://discovered.creativecommons.org.

The materials in the search engine were not gathered from an open Web crawl; rather they were assembled from third-party repositories like the Open Courseware Consortium and the National Science Digital Library. This means that you won’t get as many results from a general search (and that it’s generally okay to do a more general search) and that the results have somewhat better details.

I did a search for physics. Information about the search results was in German (huh?) but the results themselves were in English. Results include the title of the result, a brief summary, education level (which I wish had been more helpful; I didn’t see any levels that were grade- or age- specific) and sometimes information about usage license. Some of the data fields have magnifying glasses next to them; click on the magnifying glass next to an entries field and you’ll get a refined list of results whose information that field matches the one you clicked. For example, I could click on the magnifying glass next to a CC-BY license and get only those results that had a listed CC-BY license (an attribution license.)

Actually considering where this material was gathered from I’m very surprised there were not listings with licenses included. I think this just might be an issue of metadata not being complete or properly indexed. When I did a more specific search (for momentum) there were more results with CC licenses on the front page, and when I did a level-based search (kindergarten) I also got a pretty good number of results with CC licenses.

There is some gunk in the search results (moved pages, indexes, etc.) but not much. There’s an RSS feed icon at the bottom of the search results but when I tried to use it I got an error. The summaries and resource titles are good, and I found all my searches got plenty of results. A nice education resource search, though of course I’d love more metadata.