Much of the New York Public Library’s collection of photographs, maps, drawings, postcards and other ephemera have been available online for some time. As of this week, those documents are now free for everyone’s use, as the library announced the release of more than 180,000 online archival items to the public domain.
Online visitors can download the library’s digitized, out-out-copyright holdings as high-resolution files to use as they please. Hankering for a wall-sized map of “The Brooklyn of the Future,” or some gorgeous botanical illustrations to plop on your website? The NYPL’s your one-stop shop. Even better, developers can draw on the public domain files as machine-readable data, using the library’s built-in software interfaces or their own tools. That’s where things really get interesting, as staffers of NYPL’s in-house technology department show with their interactive “public domain remixes,” released alongside this week’s announcement.
