Public Demesne: Using Public Domain Images to raise funds - Library as Incubator Project

In early January 2016, I started a fundraiser for the Society of American Archivists Mosaic Scholarship, which was made to encourage diverse entrants into the field. I wanted to contribute, but didn’t have money to spare. Instead, I created a print-on-demand store with Society6 to sell items with designs I had made. Of course, I don’t have artistic skill, either, so I modified existing illustrations from the public domain.

I’m here to document what I did, in order to show how easy it is to get a shop up and running. The benefits for cultural heritage institutions are multiple: make some cash, promote your collections, enrich the world with beautiful vintage visuals, print your own art for your walls, and learn a new skill!

The process I employed to generate profitable clothes, home decor, phone cases, and a bunch of other cool stuff is pretty straightforward:

• Identify awesome images in the public domain
• Get the highest-quality version you can
• Use Photoshop to turn the paper transparent and thicken up the ink lines
• Use Illustrator to vectorize the image and scale it to a desired size
• Use Photoshop to generate various versions of the image, depending on what products you want to sell
• Upload each version to your print-on-demand shop according to their instructions
• Promote to your pals and your library’s patrons
• Make money for your library!