Determining which materials are considered public domain can be a difficult process. From commonly held misconceptions and complex copyright laws (such as those in the United States) to restrictive digital licenses created by institutions and corporate lobbying efforts to expand copyright terms, the barriers to accessing public domain materials appear to be increasing .
Since 2011 the online magazine and non-profit project Assessment of the public domain is dedicated to exploring, researching and cataloging copyright-free historical materials from art, literature and culture in an effort to counter some of the barriers that continue to hinder public use. Now it is expanding its efforts with the launch of the Image archive in the public domain (PDIA), a new platform that aggregates more than 10,000 images from his essays and articles into one searchable, open source database.
Unveiled on Wednesday, January 8, PDIA is a digital collection spanning more than 2,000 years of visual culture, drawn from the digital repositories of more than 200 institutions around the world, including libraries, archives and museums such as the Smithsonian Institution, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“Around this time last year I had the idea to put all the images in the Assessment of the public domain in a separate archive, in a way that frees these images from their textual home and places them center stage for easier discovery, comparison and appreciation,” Adam Green, Editor-in-Chief of PDR, said, Hyperallergic.
He added that the new website creates an ‘image-first’ approach to the publication’s content, as each image contains links to related articles in the online magazine.
Green admitted that it is difficult to choose from the archive’s thousands of digitally archived materials, noting that he has a “soft spot” for scientific analog images such as those of Karl Blossfeldt. 20th century enlarged photographs of plants And 16th century manuscript illustrations of comets. His favorites also include Late 19th century Victorian illustrations of magic tricks and stage illusions, photographs of the polyhedral model of a German geometer collection taken in 1900, and Tom Seidmann-Freuds leporine folktale drawings.
Other fascinating finds in the database include color analysis charts from the early 20th century by artist Emily Noyes Vanderpoel; Works of art from the seventies visualize colonization of space based on a 1974 essay by Princeton professor Gerard K. O’Neill; And black and white photos exploring the strangely complicated art by orange peel sculptures. (This citrus view of a pig made in 1910 is absolutely glorious.)
A search function on the website allows users to sort image results in different ways; for example from large to small, which is especially useful for people looking for high-resolution images.
The archive will be updated with new material every week, Green said, noting that additional features will be incorporated into the platform in the near future, such as the ability to browse based on an image’s dominant color.
“We’re also really excited about collaborating with others, for example research students, to use our dataset to do really cool things in terms of visualization and new ways of displaying the images,” Green said. “I’m not sure where that’s going to go yet, but there’s a lot of potential.”
