6) Creative Commons Media Search

Creative Commons “helps you legally share your knowledge and creativity to build a more equitable, accessible, and innovative world” (Creative Commons). When I first opened the site using the link on the Course calendar, I was brought to a search screen. However, I didn’t necessarily know what to search for. Should I search for something Digital Publishing related or something completely random? I decided to search for a broad topic first. Flowers seemed simple enough and was the first thing I thought of. I was then given 843 pages worth of pictures of flowers, each with the author, who/where the image is licensed under, and the original source. Below is an example of a photo by “xkcded” licensed under “CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0“.

I then decided to try something more specific. I searched “Genre” and only received four pages worth of images. Below is an image that came up when I searched this. As it states on their website, “CC Search will enable users to curate, tag, and remix that content” (Creative Commons) and I thought it was interesting which searches brought up more results than others. The flower images were beautiful and yielded more results while my genre search produced examples that may not have been as relative or useful.

I then browsed the website as a whole. I clicked on the “Use and Remix” option which brought me to a page with a description of what that meant, a search bar, and Attributing Sources. I decided to insert the word “flowers” again to see what would happen. The site then gave me options of where I wanted to search for this term. I chose “Open Clip Art Library” and was brought to a page with thousands of clipart options of flowers. I did the same with “genre” and chose youtube instead. It then brought me to youtube with many different styles of videos that focused on genre. I thought this was interesting and enjoyed experimenting with the search options of this site.

I believe some of the limitations stem from the initial search option. As I mentioned, there were not as many options as I would have anticipated. However, I may be missing the point of the search entirely or I could be using it completely wrong. One of my own limitations is not exactly knowing what I wanted or what I was using Creative Commons for. However, I also thought it was cool that there were different articles or blog posts to read while browsing the cite to learn more about it as well. I think the site is beneficial for specific ideas, particularly images as those seemed the most prominent, and to get some information from. Nevertheless, without a specific idea, I feel like it would be somewhat difficult to navigate.

word count: 465

work cited:

“Search .” CC Search prototype, Creative Commons , ccsearch.creativecommons.org/?search=genre&page=1&search_fields=tags&per_page=20&work_types=cultural&providers=rijksmuseum.