In Fearless Future’s attempt to remove the scourge that is clipart from the face of the earth, here is a list of stock photography sites and other alternatives:

Cheap sites:

• http://www.istockphoto.com/
  Great quality, most images are $1 - $5 but can go up as high as $40 for huge images.
• http://www.bigstockphoto.com/
  Images range from $1.40 -$2.50 each for all of them.

Expensive sites:

• http://www.veer.com/
  Impeccable quality, but pricey. Images range from $130 - $420 each or discs of multiple images in a set for $500.
• http://www.corbis.com/
  If you can’t find it on Veer you can find it on Corbis, prices are practically identical.
• http://www.photos.com/en/
  One of many stock photo subscription sites (basically you pay them a fee and they provide you with unlimited access to their collection). The subscriptions range from 1 month ($140) to a year ($600), this would be a great option if you use enough images to make it worth it.

Alternate options:

This is where is gets fun. These are free and/or alternate options to typical stock photos.

• http://creativecommons.org/
  Creative Commons is an alternative to copyright. On their site, they have a searchable repository of different types of digital works that are licensed under that would allow you to use them almost always for free (if you don’t use them on commercial projects and you say who created them)
• http://www.zoo-m.com/flickr-storm/
  With the advanced search on this site you can search the popular photo community flickr for images that are published under Creative Commons. If you find a picture/artist you like, send them an e-mail and see if you can use their work for your project.
• http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/catalog.html
  Library of Congress’ Prints & Photographs Online Catalog. LOC has digitized a ton of their prints and offered them up online for the taking - the majority of them are out of copyright.
• http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html
  The American Memory Project is just like the Prints & Photographs but focuses on the “American Experience.”

Feel free to add to the list at the AcademicPR Forum under “Marketing and PR”

I was browsing through BibliOdyssey, a repository for strange and beautiful images from books, and it reminded me that I have only a slight idea of what treasures exist in the archives of my institution.

Your archives are a treasure-trove of images and/or inspiration for use in your marketing materials. I’ve used materials from archives for everything from annual reports to event invitations.

I encourage you to throw on those white gloves, and start digging around your archives for materials. And I offer this tip, you can photograph some of the more fragile pieces rather than scanning them and still get very usable images.

Have you checked out Del.icio.us yet?

If you’re late to the game as I am, let me clue you in…

Del.icio.us is a “social bookmarking” site, which basically means that you have an online repository for all your bookmarks, with the ability to see who else has the same site saved as you, and also to browse their entire bookmark catalog.

The benefit of this might not be immediately apparent, but this is a great source of inspiration. Say you have a weird page of avant-garde Russian constructivist propaganda posters bookmarked that you stumbled upon a year ago. You can instantly see that 62 other people have the same site bookmarked. Most likely than not, the people have this site bookmarked have some of the same interests as you, so take a minute and browse their bookmarks, you might discover something new and right up your alley.

Even if you don’t take advantage of the “social” aspect of del.icio.us, you’ll have a browser independent list of all of your important bookmarks.

Check out my del.icio.us if you want to try it out before you sign up. (It’s free to sign up by the way.)