Finding Unique Photos, Texts and More in Public Domain
blog·@mother2chicks·
0.000 HBDFinding Unique Photos, Texts and More in Public Domain
#### It often takes lots of Internet sleuthing to find those great nuggets of material you might want for your personal use. Once found you then have to decipher the small print searching for the copyright policy to determine if its legal to use. #### >The truth is something created a long ago is not automatically in the public domain, especially the online digital versions. Many pubic works are published online under a restrictive license known as CC BY-NC, which means there can be no commercial use of the material. #### “Tis better to be safe than sorry!” Beware of the various licensing tools when searching for materials in the public domain will save you time and trouble. #### #### So...I decided to list some great Public Domain sites where people can locate and freely use books, art, music, and photographs for their purposes. #### <br>  [Europeana](https://www.europeana.eu/portal/en) An online portal for exploring Europe’s cultural collections. Its currently collecting vast quantities of digital works and data from cultural heritage institutions all across Europe.  [Biodiversity Heritage Library](https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/Default.aspx) A fantastic initiative bringing together huge collections of material related to the study of living organisms from groups of natural history and botanical libraries. All in accordance with open principles, what is in the public domain stays in the public domain. They’ve teamed up with Internet Archive to curate all their of digital materials.  [Pond5](https://www.pond5.com/free) A wonderful resource with thousands of historic media files to use for your creative projects. It contains more than 60,000 image files, 2,500 audio files, and 10,000 film files and more then 100 3D models from NASA.  [OpenGLAM](https://openglam.org/open-collections) For a good list of institutions that have opened up their digital collections. [Archive](https://archive.org) Everyone knows about the internet archive when searching for interesting material. There is vast collections of cultural content and links to a huge variety of public domain works including films, music and books. >Important-many of the books at the archive have been scanned by Google who has published them under a license which restricts their use to non-commercial activities only. They want everything! [Digital Library Projects in a table format with links](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_digital_library_projects) Use these tools listed below to get help when searching for CC licensed materials!  [Creative Commons Search Tool](https://search.creativecommons.org/?betaActive=1&q=) Another avenue for locating public domain material is through the Creative Commons search tool. It searches according via Europeana, Flickr, and Google Images among others. Be aware there is no verification process in place ______ [In the U.S. Stanford site on U.S. copyright](https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/public-domain/)– A very clear explanation of the U.S. system, including lots of tools to check public domain status. [In Europe](http://outofcopyright.eu/calculator.html) Great resource, including to help determine if a work is in the public domain in your country.