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Dear Arlisians,
Greetings from NYPL Labs! Today we are proud to announce that out-of-copyright materials in
NYPL Digital Collections are now available as high-resolution downloads. No permission required, no hoops to jump through: just go forth and reuse!
The release of more than 180,000 digitized items represents both a simplification and an enhancement of digital access to a trove of unique and rare materials: a removal of administration fees and processes from public domain content, and also improvements to interfaces — popular and technical — to the digital assets themselves. Online users of the
NYPL Digital Collections website will find more prominent download links and filters highlighting restriction-free content; while more technically inclined users will also benefit from updates to the
Digital Collections API enabling bulk use and analysis, as well as data exports and utilities posted to
NYPL's GitHub account. These changes are intended to facilitate sharing, research and reuse by scholars, artists, educators, technologists, publishers, and Internet users of all kinds. All subsequently digitized public domain collections will be made available in the same way, joining a growing repository of open materials.
To encourage novel uses of our digital resources, we are also now accepting applications for a new
Remix Residency program. Administered by the Library's digitization and innovation team,
NYPL Labs, the residency is intended for artists, information designers, software developers, data scientists, journalists, digital researchers, and others to make transformative and creative uses of digital collections and data,and the public domain assets in particular. Two projects will be selected, receiving financial and consultative support from Library curators and technologists.
To provide further inspiration for reuse, the NYPL Labs team has also released several demonstration projects delving into specific collections, as well as a
visual browsing tool allowing users to explore the public domain collections at scale. These projects, which suggest just a few of the myriad investigations made possible by fully opening these collections, include:
- a "mansion builder" game, exploring floor plans of grand turn-of-the-century New York apartments;
- a then-and-now comparison of New York's Fifth Avenue, juxtaposing 1911 wide angle photographs with Google Street View; and
- a "trip planner" using locations extracted from mid-20th century motor guides that listed hotels, restaurants, bars, and other destinations where Black travelers would be welcome.
The public domain release spans the breadth and depth of NYPL's holdings, from the Library's rich New York City collection, historic maps, botanical illustrations, unique manuscripts, photographs, ancient religious texts, and more. Materials include:
- Berenice Abbott's iconic documentation of 1930s New York for the Federal Art Project
- Farm Security Administration photographs by Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, and others
- Manuscripts of American literary masters like Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Papers and correspondence of founding American political figures like Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison
- Sheet music for popular American songs at the turn of the 20th century
- WPA-era lithographs, etchings, and pastels by African American artists
- Lewis Hine's photographs of Ellis Island immigrants and social conditions in early 20th century America
- Anna Atkins' cyanotypes of British algae, the first recorded photographic work by a woman (1843)
- Handscrolls of the Tale of Genji, created in 1554
- Medieval and Renaissance illuminated manuscripts from Western Europe
- Over 20,000 maps and atlases documenting New York City, North America, and the world
- More than 40,000 stereoscopic views documenting all regions of the United States
Go forth, and reuse!
Sara
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Sara Rubinow Metadata Specialist III, Metadata Services Unit
NYPL Labs
New York Public Library
212.930.9240
