Harvard Library Shares the Public Domain: Unlocking Centuries of Knowledge for AI and Research | Harvard Library

"This year, Harvard Library made its Public Domain Corpus available to the public for research, teaching, learning, and creative activities. Kyle K. Courtney, Director of Copyright and Information Policy at Harvard Library, explains what the corpus is and why it’s an important public access resource....

The HLPD Corpus is a dataset of nearly one million digitized public domain books from Harvard’s collection, spanning more than six centuries, multiple languages, and countless genres. It’s not just a collection of texts, it’s a vast record of human knowledge and cultural memory, transformed into structured, research-ready data. By making this data accessible to the public, we’re inviting researchers, educators, and innovators to explore them in ways that were never possible when they were bound to physical volumes. It’s unlocking the public domain for transformative scholarship now and into the future."