Place Yourself in the Repositories! Virtual Backgrounds for your Video-Conferencing

With meetings now taking place online, it can be jarring to have your colleagues in your home—sometimes for the first time! For everyone from journalists to world leaders, finding a professional background that is not a distraction for your meeting can be difficult. Fortunately, Boston College Libraries have a variety of different resources for spicing up and professionalizing your meetings.

Our Open Access repositories provide some creative backgrounds that can help add flare to calls. Keep in mind that it is best to have a solid color as a background—without a green screen, our cameras can be a bit confused. Finding good landscape images can be a good start, and there is no shortage!

One great potential selection for backgrounds are some of the images from the Japanese prints collection, 1765-1964. This collection of 96 images contains examples of ukiyo-e, mingei (folk arts) and sosaku hanga (creative-style, potentially more abstract pieces) which provide some beautiful scenes.

Folk art from 1953 is represented by this piece; “Shrine Garden.”

“Winter in Aizu” is a woodblack print from the 1900s.

“No. 39 of Sixty Nine Stations of Kisokaido Road” is from the middle of the 1830s.

This piece from the early 1830s as part of a series of 36 views of Mount Fuji.

If you are looking for something more Boston College-centric, the collection of Boston College building and campus images provides a wide-ranging view of the Chestnut Hill campus through the centuries – with many photos taken of iconic Boston College halls in the middle of their construction.

The construction of Devlin Hall – captured in 1920.

O’Neill Library Exterior at night, 1984.

This image depicts the strike flag that hung on the Gasson Bell Tower during the 1970 strike.

Take center-stage with this shot of the Bapst Auditorium from 1926.

The British Catholic Authors Room by Clifton Church – this photograph is from 1880.

The Boston College open repositories have other great background resources as well. While the photographs provide great visual insights, the diverse collections of multimedia add to historical knowledge of Boston as researchers continue to analyze and gather information about the world around them. These landscapes from the Becker Collection and Boston Gas Company provide some great historical contexts, and aesthetic backgrounds for virtual meetings.