The idea behind BEMA is to make images, which might otherwise be lost or remain inaccessible for decades or even longer, available to anybody with an interest in the East Mediterranean. Whether you are preparing a book or article, giving a lecture, preparing a school presentation or have a general interest in the region, these images, collected over many years by people with a range of different interests, may have something to offer you. The documents which accompany them tell stories of friendships, politics and scholarship as well as East Mediterranean hsitory.
For this reason, we do not charge for these images if they are being used for non-commercial purposes, and we try wherever possible to make the highest resolution versions we have available so they are ready to be used by anybody. We also make these images available under a Creative Commons licence for the same reason. In order to keep this archive working we would therefore ask you to be aware of and follow these procedures for using images:
Accessing Images:
All of the archived images on this site were originally stored and made accessible via Flickr but are now being systematically moved onto storage on this site. You are free to access images directly from both locations during this transitional phase. Please feel free to download and use images as required from either location.
Copyright:
We copyright the archive images under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial, No Derivatives 3.0 International licence. While we do not manage physical archives, we retain copyright over all digital images. Simply put, this means that you may use these images for any non-commercial purpose as long as you give an appropriate attribution and make it clear what, if any, changes you have made to the image.
Each of our archives has a slightly different appropriate attribution, which depends on who created the physical archive, but the recommended format will usually be:
Image XXX, from the XXXXX Archive, digitised by Birmingham East Mediterranean Archive.
The main page within this site of each specific archive will provide more detailed information on the correct attribution of any image taken from that archive.
Scholarly publishing and commercial use:
As noted above, our licensing does not cover commercial use. This is partly because we use any income from this project to continue to fund this project (buying equipment, paying for phone calls to archive owners, paying for online storage etc.). We are not in this to make money, however. If at some point [insert major brand here] decides that one of these images is exactly the backdrop it wants for its new ad campaign (we can dream, right?), we would like to be able to take advantage of such good fortune for the future benefit of this archiving project! We are not interested in making money out of a small print-run of an academic publication just because, technically, its author will receive some royalties and therefore could technically be considered to be making commercial use of the image. We are likewise aware that most scholarly publishing in the form of journal articles, brings with it no remuneration at all, but quite often incurs charges for image reproduction.
If you would like to use any of the archive images in a publication, we encourage you to do so. Please provide the appropriate attribution, and we would love to know about it in order to see what use the archive is being put to. If articles using images from the archive are published in an Open Access digital format we will provide links from this site, so that other users can also read your work. If an electronic version is not available, and you are able to, we would encourage you to send a copy of your publication to either of us by post (see Contact us). All such publications will be offered to the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham to continue to develop the Centre’s important library of East Mediterranean scholarship.
Should you be considering using archive images for commercial purposes, or if you are not sure how commercial your project is, please get in touch with us. We consider every case of commercial reproduction on a case-by-case basis with the aim of ensuring that accessibility of this material should always be the determining factor.
We cannot police any of this, of course. Our requests above are exactly that and we would much rather the images be put to use than not, so if in doubt, please enjoy, research and present these images. It is what they were made for!
