Pixelization

Public Domain Site of the Month: NOAA Photo Library

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, better known as "NOAA," has made a huge number of incredibly valuable public-domain images available on their photo library website.

Searchable and organized into collections and albums, the NOAA image collection includes nature at its scariest (tornados and lightning), cutest (curious and cuddly baby polar bears), and ugliest (scorpion fish and angler fish).

A particularly helpful reference set is a collection of animal shots called NOAA's Ark. While most of the collection is utilitarian or photojournalistic in character, there are some artistic photographs as well. And it's not just photographs. There are beautiful antique etchings and woodcarvings.

NOAA's librarians, developers, and photographers put forth a lot of effort to create such a valuable public resource. It's appreciated.

Public Domain Site of the Month: Miami University's Victorian Trade Card Collection

Here's the most recent site I've found with a wealth of public domain art: the Victorian Trade Card Collection at Miami University. 

These beautiful business post cards are a trove of all kinds of art. Covered wagons in Nebraska advertising Arbuckle Bros. coffee. A view of Ohio's Garfield Monument, the presidential resting place, brought to you by Mica Axle Grease. Tobogganing children to promote Champion-brand biscuits. 

The site explains that tradecards were a uniquely American form of advertising that reached its zenith in the 1880s and 1890s. Thanks to Miami University (that's the one in Ohio - not the similarly named university in Florida) there are thousands available online. 

Public Domain Source of the Month: The Library of Congress, American Memory

The Library of Congress's American Memory project began as a pilot program in 1990 endeavoring to digitize and make accessible some of its massive holdings. Originally, the program centered around making materials available on CD-ROM. As the internet became ubiquitous, the emphasis moved online. Millions of items are now available through the web.

According to the LoC, American Memory will continue to expand its online offerings "as an integral component of the Library of Congress’s commitment to harnessing new technology as it fulfills its mission 'to sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations.'"

Translation: What's online and available dwarfs what the LoC has in its basement. And the searching is very cumbersome. But the LoC is moving forward, and they understand access to the public domain as part of their mission.

While there's more work to do, what's available now is still wonderful. There's films, photographs, maps, sound recordings, manuscripts, and more.

A great place to start is the browsing index. Just pick a subject. Then all you have to do is hire some celebrity voice-over artists, and you're on your way to being the next Ken Burns.

If you're having trouble negotiating the colossal stores of digital content, you can make use of the LoC's Ask a Librarian service to get expert reference-desk help. It's completely free (or, to be precise, at no explicitly stated additional cost, assuming you're a U.S. taxpayer).

Illustration:Poster for the Independence Day celebration at the DuPage County Centennial in Downers Grove, Illinois, retrieved from the American Memory collection.

Public Domain Source of the Month: USDA

There's something culturally essential about farm imagery. Identifying farm animals is one of the first things a baby learns - even though, in the suburbs and cities, most children will rarely encounter them. Why don't toddlers learn to point out things such as "billboard," "SUV," or "blackberry"?

For whatever reason we cling to our bucolic heritage, the toddler cannon of iconic nouns for decades to come is likely to remain: "duck," "cow," "horse," "pig," "sheep," and the like.

Thousands of photographs taken by the U.S. Department of Agriculture thus constitute an important source of public-domain imagery.

About 2,000 cherry-picked images are indexed as the Agricultural Research Service Image Gallery. Thousands more are available from the USDA Photography Center. It's everything you need for your custom-build bedtime story.

A different kind of treasure can be found in the USDA Historical Photos collection, which provides an illustrated index of a small sample of Farm Security Administration photographs of the 1930s and 1940s. These photos by Dorothea Lange and others chronicle the Dust Bowl and the lives of migrant farm workers in the west. Unfortunately, this site lacks higher resolution images suitable for use in print.

Photos top to bottom: Piglets, Scott Bauer; sunflowers in North Dakota, Bruce Fritz; Texan outside of Dallas in 1936, Dorothea Lange; cow, Peggy Greb.

Public Domain Source of the Month: Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music at Johns Hopkins University

The Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music of the Sheridan Libraries of Johns Hopkins University contains over 29,000 pieces of sheet music, predominantly popular American music from the 1800s and early 1900s.

It is the personal collection and lifelong passion of the late Lester Levy, a Johns Hopkins alum who left these riches to his alma mater.

Most of it is old enough that it has fallen into the public domain, which has allowed Johns Hopkins to make it available to the world through the website.

As Levy saw it, his sheet-music collection is a reflection of America's history.

"We sang the virtues of a war or a president," he wrote. "We touched on the American sense of humor. We sang about our mode of dress or advances in technology, or the prevailing attractions of the people at any particular time. Our popular music covered every situation."

Johns Hopkins' librarians pay fitting tribute to Levy on the library's website for the gift he gave the university. But someone needs to heap some praise on the librarians. The collection is beautifully presented, and it is organized so that it is highly accessible. All sheet music that is old enough to be in the public domain has been turned into jpeg images and assembled PDFs. You can take it in either format. Just download, print, and play. It's as easy as that.

Unless you're like me, and you can't read music. In which case, you will be pleased to know that the illustrated covers, reproduced in resplendent color, are a wealth of treasure in themselves.

The collection is easy to search. But you can also browse through the boxes in which Levy arranged his collection.

Public Domain Source of the Month: Jam Handy Films

Jam Handy films are a paragon of mid-century American culture. You may not know his name, but you know Jam Handy's work - dazzlingly optimistic study films and corporate promotional short subjects of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. You'll fall in love with the romantic portrayals of polymers, communications satellites, labor-saving kitchen appliances, and, of course, automatic pin-setting machines for the bowling centers of tomorrow.

The films are replete with iconic footage of the products, materials, and exteriors of the era, not to mention the natty housewives, thin-tied dads, and lab-coated scientists, that made the mid-20th century so ... swell.

Jam Handy Films are available from the Prelinger Collection at the Internet Archive.

Some of my favorites:
Leave It to Roll-Oh (1940)
The Golden Years (1960)
The Other Fellow (1937)
To New Horizons (1940)

My favorite line in all the films is from Leave it to Roll-Oh: "Don't look now, but this motorcar is simply full of robots!"

(A big part of it is how the narrator pronounces robots - "roh-buts" - you gotta love it.)

The Internet Archive marks these films as public domain - but without any explanation for what accounts for the public-domain status. One assumes their copyrights were never renewed or they were distributed without copyright notice. Depending on what you want to use Jam Handy films for, you may want to research that question. If you find out the answer, let me know. But I have no need myself to chop them up and use the parts. I love watching them whole, just the way Jam Handy made them.

Public Domain Source of the Month: Open Clip Art Library

The Open Clip Art Library collects newly created pieces of clip art dedicated to the public domain. You can use the the clip art to decorate paper documents or add some flair to your website. The site contains more than 13,700 pieces of clip art. For the most part, the clip art is provided in the "svg" (scalable vector graphic) format. Although ideal for clip art, svg does not work for website nearly as well, so you will want to convert the files to png, jpg, or gif format before including them in a web page.

The Open Clip Art Library has its collection thanks to the volunteerism of a legion of artists who created the graphics and then dedicated them to the public domain. While there are many projects encouraging the creation and distribution of content under various licenses, such as Creative Commons licenses, the Open Clip Art Library is one of the few projects that is encouraging people to go all the way and put their creations into the public domain. That means that, unlike with Creative-Commons-licensed content, there are no strings attached. You can do anything you'd like with the public domain artwork. Adapt it, put it into your own work, even use it commercially. No problem.

The project provides a fine explanation for why, when it comes to clip art, contributions really need to be dedicated to the public domain, rather than under a licensing scheme such as Creative Commons, GPL, LGPL, or others.

One limitation of the Open Clip Art Library is its search capabilities. Finding the artwork you want is cumbersome and time consuming. The search engine returns results in a list unaccompanied by thumbnail pictures, so you have to click through to see what a particular piece of clip art looks like. Hopefully some talented programmer will volunteer to help out the project by creating a more advanced search function. In the meantime, thanks to the excellent contributions of many talented artists, the effort is usually very much worthwhile.