On January 6, 2016, NYPL announced that out-of-copyright materials in NYPL Digital Collections are now available as high-resolution downloads. No permission required; no restrictions on use.
The release of more than 180,000 digitized items represents both a simplification and an enhancement of digital access to a trove of unique and rare materials: a removal of administration fees and processes from public domain content, and also improvements to interfaces — popular and technical — to the digital assets themselves. Online users of the NYPL Digital Collections website now find more prominent download links and filters highlighting restriction-free content; while more technically inclined users now benefit from updates to the Digital Collections API enabling bulk use and analysis, as well as data exports and utilities posted to NYPL's GitHub account. These changes are intended to facilitate sharing, research and reuse by scholars, artists, educators, technologists, publishers, and Internet users of all kinds.
To encourage novel uses of our digital resources, we also launched a call for applications for a new Remix Residency program, intended for digital creators to make transformative and creative uses of digital collections and data. To provide further inspiration for reuse, Labs also released several demonstration projects delving into specific collections, as well as a visual browsing tool allowing users to explore the public domain collections at scale. Taken together, these projects suggest just a few of the myriad investigations made possible by fully opening these collections. At this presentation, we’ll share the story of how we produced this release, including strategic, tactical, and impact design decisions -- and, most importantly, and how it’s been received so far.
