NYPL Shows Academic Libraries What “Public Domain” Means | The Scholarly Kitchen

"A few days ago, the New York Public Library did something truly remarkable: it made nearly 200,000 digitized photos, postcards, maps, and other images freely available online. 'But wait,' I hear you cry. 'What’s so remarkable about that? Sure, that’s a lot of images, but libraries have been digitizing public-domain documents and making them freely accessible for years. Millions of such documents can now be found online. What makes this project so unusual?' Two things set the NYPL project apart from other, similar digitization initiatives: First, the content itself. The NYPL is, obviously, not just any library. Its collection of rare and unique historical documents is unusually rich, and is of unusually broad interest ... The second thing that sets this initiative apart from many others is the fact that the NYPL has decided that it is going to treat these public-domain images like what they actually are: public intellectual property that can be reused by members of the public in any way they want ..."