Academic Libraries Supporting Visual Culture: A Survey of Image Access and Use

Visual Literacy Standards in Higher Education: New Opportunities for Libraries and Student Learning

“…21 Consistent with these findings, Jennifer Mayer and Cheryl Goldenstein's survey of image support in academic libraries reports that 67 percent of librarian respondents receive occasional or frequent requests for images from students and 85 percent instruct students on how to find images. 22 Students search for images using descriptions of what they expect to see in an image (events, people, places) but often encounter difficulty because images are not always accompanied by complete textual information or keywords describing visual or subject content. 23 Studies show that while students make at least some effort to evaluate images and their sources as part of the selection process, their practices are inconsistent.…”

“…36 In Mayer and Goldenstein's study of image support in academic libraries, librarians expressed a concern for helping students use images ethically. 37 Students often share and create visual information through social media sites and work with images across academic and personal spaces. Lee Rainie, Joanna Brenner, and Kristen Purcell report that among 18-29 year-old internet users, 67 percent post photos they have taken themselves to websites, and 52 percent take images they have found online and share or repost them on image-sharing sites.…”

Visual literacy meets information literacy

“…Additionally, one of the rationales for the need to revise the ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards is an "explosion of [visual, data, and multimedia modes of scholarship and learning] and the increasingly hybridized, multi-modal nature of learning and scholarship require an expanded conception of information literacy learning and pedagogy beyond the mostly text-based focus of the Standards" (Framework Taskforce, 2014: 3). Mayer and Goldenstein (2009) demonstrate how the rising use of images in undergraduate teaching and learning is affecting library services. They found that 85% of librarians who responded to their survey reported that they were instructing students on how to find images for school projects, including presentations, papers, posters, exhibits, as well as for fine arts, and theatre inspiration.…”

Bibliometric Study of Scholarly Writing and Publishing Patterns Concerning Copyright and Digital Images

“…Incidentally, two-dimensional images such as advertisements, artist files, cartoons, drawings, paintings or prints, photographs, postcards, posters, images of regalia, specimens, objects and architecture, medical images, menus, maps, charts or graphics, typefaces, and similar visual images have found their way into other professional areas not considered in the design fields. 27 Through the study of images, one acquires an understanding of the subject and meaning of an image within the context of the culture that produced it. 28 For example, students studying an image of an African mask in anthropology will learn the ideologies of a culture, the techniques that create the mask, and the different meanings of symbols in the image.…”