The following is a post by Sam Leon, Community Co-ordinator for The Public Domain Review and other Open Knowledge Foundation projects. It is cross-posted from the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Public Domain Working Group Blog.
At The Public Domain Review we’re always scouring the internet for public domain gems. It’s simply incredible how much of our shared cultural heritage is now available for free online. But with so much content out there and with so many different digital collections to choose from it can often be difficult to know where to start looking for interesting and curious works. On top of this, it can often be difficult to understand what you’re allowed to do with a given work and what the license that is applied to it actually means.
It was because of these difficulties that we decided to write a Guide to Finding Interesting Public Domain Works Online. In the guide you’ll find information on how to collect leads, an overview of the main online public domain collections (e.g. Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive & Wikisource) as well as some basic legal information about licensing and the public domain.
Happy exploring! If you come across something that you think could be featured on The Public Domain Review give me a shout at sam.leon [at] publicdomainreview [dot] org.
Sam is a data trainer and wrangler at Open Knowledge. He Tweets from @Noel_Mas
