Are you an inveterate remixer? Do you have a taste for collage? A blog you wish to illustrate with public domain images?
Here I note repositories of legally available content for remixing and mashing up. (Check for remix rights in your local jurisdiction, I ain’t no lawyer)
Audio
This is what I actually do with my life, so I have too many opinions to fit here. See sample libraries, musical corpora.
Images
In descending order of addictiveness.
Internet public library book images
UPDATE: ⚠️ This account was deleted without warning, all the content and annotations are gone, and the internet is a poorer place 🪦.
UPDATE 2: Account reinstated
Internet archive book images on Flickr are my favourite and have an elegant origin story The quirky and serendipitous search makes for amazing image finding.
They were my primary source of illustrations on this blog, although I switched to Picryl when they were deleted, and removed many links from this blog. For example, Jan David’s 1603 classic Christeliicken waerseggher images are wildly tripped out. ( IPL link.) AFAICT they have stopped updating Flickr though and you might need to read books for the latest ones.
Public Domain Review
Founded in 2011, The Public Domain Review is an online journal and not-for-profit project dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas.
Similar to Bilbliodessy, but with more scrupulous licensing. Annoyingly you usually can’t click through to the correct page in the source books.
Favourites:
- Cat Pianos, Sound-Houses, and Other Imaginary Musical Instruments
- Redressing the Balance: Levinus Vincent’s Wonder Theatre of Nature
- Experiments and Observations in a Heated Room (1774)
- Music of the Squares: David Ramsay Hay and the Reinvention of Pythagorean Aesthetics
They do art objects
Bibliodessy
Paul K a.k.a. Bibliodessy used to lovingly hand-curate classic book images. Peking opera figures? Baltic Heraldry? The Astrolabe Molluscs? No longer active, but still worth checking out.
Emblem project
If your tastes are very specific, about weird, allegorical proto-comics from the 1600s, the Emblem Project Utrecht has you covered. Has, us covered, I should say.
Rijksmuseum
The Dutch Rijksmuseum is amazing, with high quality scans of lots of historical stuff. Of course it skews heavily, well, Dutch. But if you have a taste for engravings and lithography of the 1600s and 1700s then … well the Dutch were doing a lot of that. My favourite starting collection is mysteries.
Google indices
Google arts and culture indexes some collections, including e.g. the Rijksmueum. The search function is inaccurate but serendipitous; I usually find something better than what I searched for.
Unsplash
Unsplash is community driven copyleft photos. Less classic archival stuff, more stock-photo replacement. This is occasionally what I want.
Picryl
picryl is a paid service that indexes public domain images. High resolution images are pay-for-download and the rest are free. I could give them USD7/month for the high-resolution or I could use their search index and then use a reverse image search such as tineye to find a higher resolution version. Occasionally that way I find one that is higher resolution than even the paid-for picryl copy.
The search function is reasonably good. The UX is rough in spots — don’t get me started on their horrible date range selector. When downloading images I need to click through a remarkable number of things, and do some mandatory tagging. Maybe that goes away if I pay?
We could think of it as a pay-to-play substitute for the sadly lamented Internet Public Library Book Images project. I cannot quite justify paying their monthly rate yet (I have SO MANY MONTHLY SERVICES), but we shall see if they wear me down.
Smithsonian
The Smithsonian Institution images were a high profile open access launch. Have not tested them in practice.
Digital Commonwealth
Digital Commonwealth is a non-profit collaborative organization, founded in 2006, that provides resources and services to support the creation, management, and dissemination of cultural heritage materials held by Massachusetts libraries, museums, historical societies, and archives. Digital Commonwealth currently has over 200 member institutions from across the state.
This site, managed by the Boston Public Library, provides access to thousands of images, documents, and sound recordings that have been digitized by member institutions so that they may be available to researchers, students, and the general public.
Some really nice onces in there, e.g. Collection:19th Century American Trade Cards.
British Library collection
British Library collection is useful if a little straight-laced. They had a conservative collection policy, or a conservative upload policy. It’s hard to find lurid, prurient, or provocative images, but there are some very beautiful and edifying ones, if that is your thing.
Paris Museums
Art! Art! Art! Paris Musées have 100000 artworks for use apparently.
Metmuseum
Metmuseum Open Access has a 400,000-strong open access public domain art image collection. Resolution tends to be low. Photographs professional, though.
Incoming
- British Museum collection.
- Old book illustrations lithograph curation is good, although you must pay $15 a month to get access to many full-res versions.
- Library of Congress Picture collection.
- University of Chicago overview.
- Biodiversity Heritage Library has nature sketches and such.
- NYPL collections are good but not all full resolution without a fee.
Business town says buy this.
Currently obsessing over
- 1930s-40s in Color
- J.J. Grandville (See also Grandville, Visions, and Dreams, esp Un autre monde on Internet Archive)
- Thomas Wright’s An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe (1750)
- WW II posters
- Athanasius Kircher light and shadow at WolfenbĂĽtteler Digitale Bibliothek
- Nicolas Louis Delaunois+++
- Fludd, Robert, Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia : in duo volumnina secundum cosmi differentiam diuisa
- Kircher, Athanasius, Musurgia Universalis Sive Ars Magna Consoni Et Dissoni : In X. Libros Digesta : QuĂ Vniuersa Sonorum doctrina, & Philosophia, Musicaeque tam Theoricae, quam practicae scientia, summa varietate traditur
- WALTER DRAESNER - schattenrisss Webseite!
- Digitale Sammlungen / Bilder des Todes oder Todtentanz für alle Stände
- Digitale Sammlungen / Ein Totentanz [1]
- Ein moderner Totentanz
- Suzanne Gerber, Giving Taste A Bad Name Since Kindergarten» Blog Archive » A Mid-November Dance with Death
Books, pretty and/or interesting
Internet archive public library
One of the many wonderful features of the Internet Public Library is not its browsing page, which is a mess. I laboriously opted in to all the old (hopefully uncopyrighted) books by clicking checkboxes. Start from here to avoid disappointment.
Wellcome library
Great content, but not always a great online-first experience.
Thousands of items from our collections have been digitised, and copies are freely accessible online. Our digital collections cover a wide variety of topics, and are particularly strong in the areas of mental health, sex and sexual health, genetics, public health, and 19th-century books.
If you're a member of the library, you also have access to many of our subscription databases and resources with your library card.
Digitised materials from our collections can be accessed and downloaded for use under a variety of Creative Commons non-commercial, attribution and Public Domain licences, depending on the material.
You can find all our digital items in the catalogue. An option to limit your search to online material appears once you have entered a search term. You can also search for digital images in the “Images” tab on the catalogue
Erara
erara the incredible library of ultra-high-resolution lovingly digitised manuscripts and prints.
viaLibri
viaLibri is a search engine for actual physical books. It sometimes includes lavish high-resolution previews. Try, e.g., Rare books from 1621.
Heath Robinson online!
Not a collection per se, rather, an obsession of mine.
Textbooks
- LibreTexts
- Directory of Open Access Books
- OER Commons
- OpenStax
- Open Textbook Library
- American Inst. of Mathematics, Approved Textbooks
Clip art and icons
- undraw is one source. From the Hacker n00bs thread we also find…
- The Noun project
- FreeSVG
- Ouch! is a bunch of quirky/chunky illustrations of common situations for your quirky/chunky website.
- Humaaans provides paper-doll identikit people
- So does fresh folk.
- illustrations.co is a 100-illustrations-in-100-days thing
- Isometric does isometric illustrations.
- Glaze: stock vector illustrations via crowdsourcing and profit-share
- Lukasz Adam is a productive solo illustrator’s loss-leader
- fonteawesome provdies line-art as a font; some cleverness is required to convert it to SVG, or one can get downloads and other expanded features via a subscriptio
3d models
- Redwood data, A Large Dataset of Object Scans
- Smithsonian 3d models
Film
- World’s cinema has copies of many art-house films. Provenance unclear and thus suspect.
- content on torrent aggregators like torrends.to, thepiratebay.net, demonoid.is, ww1.1337x.buzz/1337x.to and rarbg.to is not necessarily going to be violating copyright, but in practice, 90% of the content one finds there will be in violation, and it is best to steer clear.
General
- Open Culture tracks “675 Free Movies, 550 Free Audio Books, 600 Free eBooks, 170 Free Textbooks, 300 Free Language Lessons…”. AFAICT everything here is legit but once again, be careful and check the laws in your jurisdiction.
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