Mission Statement
The primary goal of Slavery Images is to further the progress of knowledge and creativity for the benefit of humankind. This open-source website is intended for personal, educational and non-commercial purposes for students, teachers, scholars, and the general public worldwide. Throughout development, the Slavery Images team is making every effort to adhere to all accessibility standards for the hearing and visually impaired. Slavery Images offers public access to collections of historical materials and 3D educational environments related to the history of the African slave trade and slave life in the early African diaspora. Many materials contained herein were products of their particular times, and may contain offensive language or negative stereotypes. Slavery Images does not condone racism, discrimination, or prejudice of any kind.
Copyright of Historical Images
These images were obtained from primary sources made before 1924 and they are in the public domaine and free to use, republish and modify. If you believe Slavery Images violates copyright in anyway, please contact us directly so that we may arrive at a solution and/or remove the appropriate images as required.
Conditions of Use and Attribution
Acknowledgements fall under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International license (CCBY-NC 4.0). We have provided a citation guide on an image-by-image basis, which can be found at the bottom of the metadata for each image.
Additional Copyright Information
Slavery Images cannot grant or deny permission to publish or otherwise redistribute any materials. Most of the historical images displayed on this website were created before 1923, meaning they are considered to be in the public domain under the "Fair Use" clause in U.S. Copyright Law. Slavery Images also recommends taking into careful consideration the Library of Congress’s guidelines related to Copyright and Other Restrictions That Apply to Publication/Distribution of Images: Assessing the Risk of Using a P&P Image, as well as the library's Legal Disclaimer.
In most cases, the sources we have used to digitize images are available in several, if not most, major research libraries, particularly those with large collections of materials related to the history of the African diaspora. Users interested in obtaining higher resolution images from original sources are advised to locate sources themselves through conventional searches of online catalogs of major university or public research libraries, as well as WorldCat/OCLC. We intentionally provide no additional information on the location of sources within the metadata because multiple copies likely exist. In some cases, however, certain images have restricted distribution rights, especially materials derived from rare books and special collections. Whenever applicable, Slavery Images usually acknowledges these specific restrictions within the metadata of a specific image. In such cases, the acknowledgement of a particular library in our metadata does not mean this library is the only place the image is located. For more information about where specific images displayed on this website originated, we have included for your reference a copy of Jerome Handler's Research Notes. His notes, which include printouts of Handler's library searches, were digitized "as is" from two boxes organized alphabetically according to the author of a resource within which an image, or multiple images, were displayed or published.
Image Quality Disclaimer
Attempts are being made to obtain and provide the best quality images possible. Slavery Images does not offer any assistance or advice regarding image quality control. This website was designed to function with the International Image Interoperabilty Framework (IIIF).
Open-Source Code and Past Websites
All aspects of Slavery Images are intended for the public domain, including source code. We aim to use as much open-source code as possible, and if it is not available, any code we develop will be made available. Due to the relaunch of the site which incorporates IIIF, Brumfield Labs built an Omeka S module to install and launch Mirador for items. This barebones implementation gives users a new Mirador action for items that will bring up an item in a new Mirador container page. It contains the final release of Mirador 2. This module is not intended for anyone who is not comfortable developing their own themes.
We also aim to host past versions of the website to demostrate development over time. Past versions can be accessed via Project History.