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

scann's bookmarks 2018-11-13

Summary:

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!

Link:

http://www.libraryasincubatorproject.org/?p=18202

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » scann's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.glam oa.images oa.museums oa.pd oa.ch oa.copyright

Date tagged:

11/13/2018, 13:46

Date published:

11/13/2018, 08:46