Resources

Following are a few places where you can find public domain works on the web:


Wikimedia Commons – Wikipedia’s media repository, which contains plenty of public domain images



Wikisource – Wikipedia’s source repository, including many public domain texts



Internet Archive – one of the world’s largest collections of digitized materials, including thousands of public domain books, films and music



Flickr Commons – images from libraries, museums and archives, many of which are in the public domain and freely reusable



Project Gutenberg – a volunteer effort to create and proofread plain text versions of thousands of public domain written works



Library of Congress – makes millions of digital objects, comprising tens of petabytes, available at its American Memory site.



Europeana – Over 15 million items sourced from around 1500 institutions across Europe including such renowned names such as the British Library in London, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Louvre in Paris, as well as many smaller organisations.

IMAGES: Codex Mendoza



An Aztec codex, detailing military conquests and daily routine, created about twenty years after the Spanish conquest of Mexico with the intent that it be seen by Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain. En route to its commissioner it was stolen by the French, and finally ended up in a library in England:



TEXTS: A Floral Fantasy in an Old English Garden



Flowers in an English garden become players in Walter Crane's beautifully illustrated fantastical verse from 1899. Crane is considered to be the most prolific and influential children’s book creator of his generation and one of the strongest contributors to the child's nursery motif.



IMAGES: Illuminated pages from 15th century Breviaries



A selection of beautifully illuminated Breviary pages from various unknown miniaturists working in and around Paris, Bruges and Gent in the middle of the 15th century. A breviary (from Latin brevis, ‘short’ or ‘concise’) is a book of the Latin liturgical rites of the Catholic Church.



Texts: A Burlesque Translation of Homer



Homer's Iliad set to bawdy verse by Thomas Bridges (c.1710-c.1775), originally published in 1762 under the pseudonym Caustic Barebones. The work achieved some popularity, and was reprinted several times, the last in 1797.



FILMS: Prelinger Archive 35mm Stock Footage



A fantastic new collection recently uploaded by the Prelinger Archive to the Internet Archive under a Creative Commons Attribution License. Digitized into HD from 35mm original negatives and release prints dating back to the first decade of the 20th century, these unedited sequences were shot for feature films but never used.



IMAGES: Benjamin Betts’ Geometrical Psychology



Diagrams from Geometrical psychology, or, The science of representation: an abstract of the theories and diagrams of B. W. Betts (1887) by Louisa S. Cook, which details New Zealander Benjamin Bett’s remarkable attempts to mathematically model the evolution of human consciousness through geometric forms.



FILMS: The Dog Factory



A rather dark and bizarre Edison short from 1904. Two men are operating a ‘dog factory’, using a device that they call the Dog Transformator, which turns dogs into sausages for a new customer to choose and turn back into a dog.



TEXTS: Catalogue of Mme Tussaud’s Historical Relics & Other Curiosities



Catalogue from 1901 detailing Mme Tussaud’s non-waxwork collection, including such gems as the cravat Charles I wore on on his execution morning, a lock of Napoleon's hair, and the shrunken head of a South American chief.



Images: Maps from Geographicus



In March 2011, Geographicus Rare Antique Maps, a specialist dealer in fine and rare antiquarian cartography and historic maps, donated their collection of over 2000 digital images to Wikimedia Commons. Here is just a small selection of a really great collection.



FILMS: The Dream of Mrs L.L. Nicholson from Oakland, California



In 1924 California’s Tribune-American newspaper ran a competition for its readers to write in with their most unusual dreams, the winning entry being made into a short film - this is the winner, a strange tale of a mother losing her baby.



TEXTS: James Joyce’s Chamber Music



Collection of love poems by James Joyce, originally published by Elkin Matthews in May, 1907, the same year he refused Joyce’s manuscript for Dubliners, and mostly written before he first ‘stepped out’ with his wife to be Nora in 16 June 1904.



IMAGES: Plates from Spiegel’s De formato foetu liber singularis



Plates illustrating a 17th century anatomical work by the Belgian physician Adriaan Van Spiegel about the formation of the foetus in the womb. The engravings are the work of Titian's student Odoardo Fialetti (1573-1638), and engraver, Francesco Valesio (b. ca. 1560).



Films: Trapeze Disrobing Act



A naughty little skit from 1901 filmed by the Edison company.



IMAGES: A Catalogue of Polish Bishops



16th century illuminations by Stanislaw Samostrzelnik for The Catalogue of the Archbishops of Gniezno and Lives of the Bishops of Cracow, a 16th century manuscript by the Polish priest, soldier and chronicler Jan Długosz.



FILMS: The Battle of San Pietro



John Huston documentary commissioned by the US army to record their efforts to take Italy in the Battle of San Pietro Infine in 1943. The US Army ended up refusing to show the film because it was too honest in its portrayal of the high cost of battle and the difficulties faced.



TEXTS: Selection of Type is just as important as the selection of words



An “Alphabetical Index to Type Faces” from the G.A. Davis Printing Company. Full of bizarre ‘accidental’ sentences such as “Summer-time with outdoor pleasures become flowers with nature”, and “Domestic animals are nuisance when a hurry to men”.



Audio: Excerpt from an 1888 performance of Handel’s Israel in Egypt



Until the discovery of an 1860 recording of “Au clair de la lune” in 2009, this haunting excerpt from Handel’s oratorio recorded in 1888 was the oldest known recorded human voice in existence. A note on the cylinder reads: “A chorus of 4000 voices recorded with phonograph over 100 yards away”.



Texts: Napoleon’s Oraculum



Found among his personal possessions after the defeat of his army at Leipzig in 1813, Napoleon's Oraculum (or Book of Fate) was apparently consulted by the emperor "before every important occasion". Based on a text originally discovered in one of the Royal tombs of Egypt during a French military expedition of 1801.



FILMS: Your Name Here (1960)



Bizarre short film from Calvin Communications, in which they satirise their own formulaic approach to industrial promotional films, showing how the idea of the "American Dream" is utilised to sell products.



Images: Space Colony Art from the 1970s



In the 1970′s the Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill with the help of NASA Ames Research Center and Stanford University held a series of space colony summer studies which explored the possibilities of humans living in giant orbiting spaceships. Colonies housing about 10,000 people were designed and a number of artistic renderings of the concepts were made.



FILMS: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari



Directed by Robert Wiene, this is one of the most influential of German Expressionist films and often considered one of the greatest horror movies of the silent era – notable for having introduced the ‘twist ending’ in cinema and for its weird and distorted set design.



Audio: Charlie and His Orchestra



The Nazi-sponsored German propaganda swing band were broadcast on short-wave to British listeners every Wednesday and Saturday at at 9pm during WW2. The songs stressed how badly the war was going for the target audience, and how it was only going to be a matter of time before they would be beaten. Apparently, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was a big fan.



Texts: The Last American



Short future history novel from John Ames Mitchell (1845–1918). First published in 1889, it is the fictional journal of Persian admiral Khan-Li, who in the year 2951 rediscovers North America by sailing across the Atlantic.



Films: American Day in Tripoli, Libya (1962)



Filmed 11 years after independence from Italian colonial rule and 7 years before a group of military officers led by a 28 year old Muammar al-Gaddafi staged a coup d’état against King Idris bringing the monarchy to an end and beginning Gadaffi’s 42 year rule.



Texts: Across the Zodiac, the Story of a Wrecked Record



Centering around the creation of a substance called “apergy”, a form of anti-gravitational energy, Percy Gregg’s 1880 novel details a flight to Mars. Notable as containing probably the first alien language to be described in detail, it also contains possibly the first instance of the word “Astronaut”, the name of the narrator’s spacecraft.



Films: The Thief of Bagdad



Swashbuckler film from 1924 directed by Raoul Walsh and starring Douglas Fairbanks, telling the story of a thief who falls in love with the daughter of the Caliph. The film is dripping with special effects of the period (flying carpet, magic urn and fearsome monsters) and features massive Arabian-style sets.



TEXTS: Uriah Jewett and the Sea Serpent of Lake Memphemagog



A very curious little book concerning a poet named Uriah Jewett, a sea serpent, the disappearance of a cheat named Hoyt, and the possible illegitimate child of Prince Arthur born in the forests of Canada.



FILMS: Passion and Death of Christ



La Vie et la passion de Jesus Christ is a 1903 French silent film directed by Lucien Nonguet and Ferdinand Zecca, and is believed to be the first feature film to have colourised sequences. Features a wonderfully thespian Jesus in the lead role.



Images: Kitab al-Bulhan or Book of Wonders



Illustrations from the The Kitab al-Bulhan, or Book of Wonders, an Arabic manuscript dating mainly from the late 14th century A.D. made up of astrological, astronomical and geomantic texts compiled by Abd al-Hasan Al-Isfahani.
















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Community Coordinator: Sam Leon
Researcher: Leila Peacock

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