As some of you will know, Public Domain Works, a joint initiative of the Open Knowledge Foundation, Free Culture UK and the Open Rights Group, had its alpha launch back in August. The Public Domain Works Database is an open registry of artistic works that are in the public domain. Since the project was first publicly announced in June 2006, the PDW team have been busy mining through data kindly donated by Phillip Harper and the BBC Archives and building a web interface for it.

After an initial plan to partner with a project called WikiBiblio, Jon Phillips of Creative Commons announced that WikiBiblio was going to merge with the Open Library (whom we’ve blogged about before). He also suggested that Public Domain Works becomes a partner – which is currently being arranged.

The plan looks to be to upload the Public Domain Works data to the Open Library, and to use read/write APIs to continue to develop different front-ends for different jurisdictions – each with its own algorithms to determine which works are in the public domain.

The Open Library will be an invaluable resource for open metadata about works in the public domain if all goes to plan!

Related posts:

1. Public Domain Works Database Project The Open Knowledge Foundation have been working on a Public Domain Works Database in association with with Free Culture UK (as part of FC-UK’s larger Public Domain Burn project). There is now a front-end site up (as of last weekend!)...
2. Alpha launch of Public Domain Works Public Domain Works advises users on the copyright status of a particular track to encourage creators and entrepreneurs to build on cultural history. Let’s say you want to use, sample or reissue a particular track, whether its Elvis, Elgar or...
3. The Open Library and Versioned Data The Internet Archive has recently launched a beta version of The Open Library. A demo can be found here and the Open Library book can be read here. It is inspired by the idea of a “library that makes all...