NYPL Public Domain Collections: Free to Share & Reuse

The year is off to a good start: today the New York Public Library made over 180.000 digital items in the public domain available for high resolution download, with no permission required and no restrictions on use. The collection includes items from the New York City collection, historic maps, botanical illustrations, unique manuscripts, photographs, ancient religious texts, and more. The library combines this launch with a new website http://publicdomain.nypl.org that collects tools, projects, and explorations to inspire users to enjoy, reuse and remix these resources. One of these is a great visualisation tool, through which you can browse through the different public domain images as sorted by period.

To encourage novel uses of these digital materials, NYPL also announced today the NYPL Labs Remix Residency. This open call invites proposals and projects to provide new ways of showing what beautiful, inspiring, and engaging things can be made from public domain collections materials, or new ways of allowing access to the information or beauty currently locked within the static digital images. Submissions for proposals are possible until 19 February 2016, with the work to be completed by the end of June 2016.

More information on the release and the resources is available from this blog.