Sue Shaffer Learning Commons and Library: Guides: Copyright &amp; Creative Commons Licensing: Finding CC Materials

Don't Forget the Attribution!

Even though an image, video, or audio file is available with a Creative Commons license, you still have to attribute it with the appropriate information.

This portion of a larger infographic, by Foter, helps to explain how to properly attribute such works.

Finding Creative Commons Materials

Below is a non-exhaustive list of websites that provide access to Creative Commons licensed media, including images, film, audio clips, and more.

Europeana
We give you access to millions of cultural heritage items from institutions across Europe. Discover artworks, books, music, and videos on art, newspapers, archaeology, fashion, science, sport, and much more.
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Not all the works are openly licensed so be sure to check for usage rights.
Foter
Foter.com allows you to search, manage and add free stock photos to blogs, forums, websites and other online media. We host over 220 million free Creative Commons images from many online sources.
Freesound
Freesound aims to create a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, and all sorts of bleeps, ... released under Creative Commons licenses that allow their reuse. Freesound provides new and interesting ways of accessing these samples.
Guide to Royalty Free Photographs
Published by the State Library of Oregon. Avoid questions of copyright and usage by using some of these resources to locate images that are royalty free.
Noun Project
Over a million curated icons, created by a global community, and available royalty-free.
Openverse
Use the Openverse search to find CC licensed works including images, videos, music, books, and more!

fka: CC Search
Pexels
A free stock photo and video website and app that helps designers, bloggers, and everyone who is looking for visuals to find great photos and videos that can be downloaded and used for free.
Pixabay
Unsplash
Beautiful, free images gifted by the world’s most generous community of photographers. Better than any royalty free or stock photos.
USA.gov Images
A compilation of images by the U.S. government. Such images are typically available in the public domain.
USA.gov Videos
A compilation of videos by the U.S. government. Such videos are typically available in the public domain.
Wikimedia
A collection of 86,590,716 freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute

YouTube

Finding Creative Commons licensed works on YouTube is fairly easy. Follow the process outlined below.

Go to YouTube
Search for the topic you're interested in. E.g., workplace bullying.
Click Filters at the top of your search results.
Click Creative Commons in the Features column.
The videos in your search results should now all be licensed with Creative Commons licenses.
To see the license for a video, select the video. Under the video, click Show More.

Although it might be a bit more difficult to find openly licensed articles, it's not impossible. The OAButton (Open Access button) is an extension that one can add to their internet browser that allows for the potential of retrieving Open Access copies of materials.

OAButton
OAbutton provides free access to papers legally by scouring the web and emailing authors. Use it on the website, via plugins for Chrome and Firefox, or embed it into your library system.