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

Academic library collections have largely reflected the dominance of text for teaching and scholarship, though our culture is increasingly visual. The authors developed a survey to answer questions about the demand for images in academic libraries and how librarians are adapting services and collections to a more visual culture. The survey was distributed to nine electronic mailing lists related to academic librarianship, resulting in 225 unique responses from diverse institutions. Survey responses indicate librarians embrace images and are finding creative ways to access both individual images and collections, though aspects of visual resources pose challenges.


Introduction
Verbal or textual forms of communication have long been the focus of teaching and scholarship at the postsecondary level. Even as images have become more prevalent and influential in our society, academic library collections have largely reflected the dominance of text. Visual resources have often resided in special collections or departmental facilities, with limited avail ability to the larger campus community.
Studies of visual culture are becoming more interdis ciplinary. Barbara Stafford describes the "visualization of knowledge" expanding across curricula in the humanities, physical and biological sciences, and the social sciences.1 Visual studies emerged as its own discipline in the late 1990s, with a number of universities adding programs or courses through diverse existing departments. Is this growing interest in visual resources unique to our library? We suspect not. As evidenced by recent conference offerings and publications, librarians are increasingly interested in visual culture and visual literacy in higher education and the potential impact on libraries. 4 Our observations left us curious about the current status of visuals in academic libraries. We developed a survey to help answer questions about the demand for images in libraries and how academic librarians are adapting their services and collections to a more visual culture.

Research Questions
The focus of our survey is on visual resources available at academic libraries, excluding archives, departmental libraries (such as art), school media centers, or museum libraries. The intended audience includes academic librarians, visual resource curators, and anyone else who conducts image-related research.
The authors wanted insight into the following: How do academic librarians use and search for images?
How and why do librarians teach users to access images?
What demand do librarians see from faculty and students for images?
Which licensed databases, links to free resources, or local collections do libraries provide for users' image needs?
Defining "images" and "visual" for the survey was somewhat difficult. We wanted to include any type of visual resource that might be useful in a learning environment but were primarily interested in separate, discrete, still images? two-dimensional objects that are visual in nature. We were not interested in images of items that were originally textual, such as digitized historical newspapers or diaries, nor in film clips or other moving images, graphic novels, art books, or patents.

Findings: Librarians and Images
We asked participants to identify activities in which they had engaged related to the acquisition of images or image databases. Approximately half (52 percent) had not selected or purchased images for their libraries. A third (34 percent) selected for acqui sition a digital image collection or image database. Eighteen percent selected individual images, and 13 percent selected a collection of print images. Ten percent had negotiated a license agreement for an image database or digital collection, and 6 percent negotiated to purchase or receive a print collection. Seventy-seven of 185 respondents answered a follow-up question asking why they selected or purchased images for their libraries. Twenty-two said they selected or purchased images to meet the expressed or perceived demands of faculty and students. Nineteen did so in response to requests or needs in specific departments, primarily in the fine arts. Fourteen saw images as important to teaching, curricula, or visual literacy. Selecting images is a regular collection development activity for seven of the respondents, and six said they were replacing slide collections. Figure 1  Academic librarians use images in a variety of ways. The most frequent use of images is to engage students during library instruction sessions (63 percent of respondents). More than half (57 percent) use images in their presentations to professional audiences. Fifty-five percent use images to illustrate the search process to students. Forty-three percent utilize images in online tutorials. A fair amount (26 percent) use images to teach visual literacy concepts. Twelve percent do not use images in their work at all. Finally, a few respondents use images in conjunction with displays and exhibits and in library marketing materials.
Librarians provide a variety of image-related instruction.
The most common type of instruction is teaching students and faculty how to find images in print or online formats (74 percent). Many librarians teach the ethical and legal aspects of image use (56 percent) and how to actually acquire the image? downloading and scanning, for example (43 percent). Seven percent said they assist with the design aspects of image use, such as placement and color. Eighteen percent of those who took the survey said they have not provided students or faculty any image-related instruction. Figure 2 lists settings where librarians provide image instruction. We asked participants how they prefer to search for images. The largest number of respondents (85 percent) reported using general or image search engines like Google or Ask.com. Seventy-three percent use subscription databases like Academic Search Premier or ARTstor. Thirty-nine percent utilize local image collections, and 27 percent search their library catalog for images. Twenty-two percent take advantage of locally devel oped finding aids, and 11 percent use print indexes. Two percent said they had never searched for images. Figures 3 and 4 high light the subscription databases and search engines preferred by participants for searching images. Appendix provides a complete listing of fee-based and free resources used by survey respondents to find images.  Demand for Images Survey results reveal a comparable demand for images from both university students and faculty. Forty-one percent of respondents indicate occasional requests for images from students (five or fewer requests per semester). Twenty-five percent of respondents report frequent (one to five requests per week) or many (more than five requests per week) requests for images from students. Only seven percent indicate they receive no image requests from students.
Thirty-nine percent of participants indicate they have occa sional requests for images from faculty. Twenty-one percent of respondents said they receive frequent or many requests for images from faculty per week. Fifteen percent indicate they Students and faculty use images in different ways. Students most frequently use images (69 percent) to incorporate them into assigned school projects, including displays, exhibits, posters, and papers. Almost as often, students require images for use in multimedia presentations (67 percent). Fifty-two percent of respondents indicated that students need to find a specific image and analyze that image. Other ways students use images include for pleasure, for studio work inspiration, and to help create theater props. Figure 5 indicates that students most often seek photographs or copies of paintings when conducting image research.
According to survey participants, the most common way faculty members use images is to supplement a class lecture (68 percent). Additional reasons for image use by faculty are for class analysis exercises (53 percent), for courseware or other online instruction (40 percent Respondents also report some demand for images from non-academic entities on campus. University public relations (24 percent) and development offices (21 percent   The authors asked about access to and circulation of collec tions. About half (51 percent) are accessible by all patrons, including the general public. Thirty-two percent limit access to individuals affiliated with the institution, and 2 percent allow access only to members of select departments. Fifteen percent have access policies that vary by collection. A couple of collections are accessible only by appointment. Fourteen percent circulate their image collections, while 24 percent do not. Twenty-eight percent have circulation policies that vary by collection. Some collections, particularly slides, are checked out only to faculty or graduate students. Other libraries circulate images except those in special collections. Two require special approval to check out images, and one library allows circulation for exhibitions. Themes of collections include sheet music, wildflowers, medicine, gambling, the history of science, the history of technology, earthquakes, disaster relief, maritime history, engi neering, and Cuban heritage. Half of the fifty-eight respondents reporting themed collections identify local, regional, or institu tional history as the focus. Twelve respondents report collections with art, architecture, or design themes. Forty-one percent of respondents with image collections say their collections do not

Conclusion
The authors were surprised at some of the survey results.
Higher percentages of respondents than anticipated are utilizing images in presentations to students or professional audiences (91 percent) and instructing students on how to find images (85 percent). Most (76 percent) said their libraries subscribe to an image database. Two-thirds represent libraries with at least one image collection. Only 2 percent said they have never searched for images. We gleaned from the responses a useful list of both subscription and free image resources (listed in Appendix B), many of which were new to us. We recognize that our partici pants were self-selecting, however, and we expect that many of those who completed the survey may have more interest in images than does the general academic library population. We asked respondents for additional comments related to the survey. Many expressed interest in offering or improving access to images, but they also mentioned some of the chal lenges associated with images?particularly digital images. Subscription image databases and digitizing collections can be expensive. Digitization expands access to visual resources, but? as one of the respondents points out?fails to capture valuable features of the original, like watermarks, inscriptions, or even frames. Some digital collections are transitory and are no longer available. Several respondents mentioned copyright, both in terms of utilizing images themselves and helping students use downloaded images ethically. Over a third (36 percent) of the respondents indicated that their libraries do not link to image resources freely available on the Web. We are concerned that this may reflect a lack of recog nition of the value of images for the academic community or at least a lack of awareness about free image resources. Images are an increasingly prevalent and influential part of today's society.
Television, movies, video games, magazines, graphic novels, social networking sites and other Web sites, and even mobile devices take advantage of the power of images to communicate and influence thoughts and behavior. Academic libraries provide resources for learning and for the creation of new knowledge; overlooking images in our collections and services excludes a wealth of information. Academic librarians and teaching faculty will find many