This week sees the launch of the “Curator’s Choice” series – a joint endeavour of The Public Domain Review and OpenGLAM – which aims to actively engage with and celebrate those cultural heritage institutions that have taken the exciting steps to open up their content.

This new series shall consist of a monthly guest post from a gallery, library, archive or museum curator reflecting upon a group of works in one of their open digital collections – that is, public domain material which has had no restrictions placed on it as it’s been digitised and made available online. This new series aims to be a celebratory spotlight on both the institutions making the exciting steps of openly licensing their digital collections and also the curators that work everyday with such collections – as well, of course, as being a celebration of the content itself.

The series shall be housed on both The Public Domain Review and the OpenGLAM website.

The inaugural post is from the British Library’s Phil Hatfield and Andrew Gray who take a look at the fascinating array of photographs in the British Library’s Canadian Colonial Copyright Collection – see it here on The Public Domain Review and here on OpenGLAM.

Here’s a sneak preview of just a few of the gems from the collection.

‘The Wrestlers’, deposited in 1905 by R. H. Trueman [copyright number 15767]. We all hope the bear was trained… – Source
Part of a series of stereoscopic photographs telling the story of Mr. Turtledove’s fancy for the French cook. Deposited in 1906 by Arthur Lawrence Merrill [copyright number 17212] – Source
Part of a photographic series on performing animals, deposited by John A. Brown in 1920 – Source

Next month’s piece shall be from the Rijksmuseum. You can follow new additions to the series through this RSS feed.

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Adam Green is Editor of The Public Domain Review.