Determining what materials are considered public domain can be a tricky process. From commonly held misconceptions and complicated copyright laws (such as those held in the United States) to restrictive digital licenses created by institutions and corporate lobbying efforts to extend copyright terms, the obstacles hindering access to public domain materials are seemingly ever-expanding.
Since 2011, the online journal and not-for-profit project Public Domain Review has been dedicated to exploring, researching, and cataloguing copyright-free historical material from across art, literature, and culture in an effort to counteract some of the barriers that continue to obstruct public use. Now, it’s expanding its efforts with the launch of the Public Domain Image Archive (PDIA), a new platform that compiles the more than 10,000 images featured across its essays and articles into one searchable, open-source database.
Unveiled on Wednesday, January 8, PDIA is a digital collection spanning over 2,000 years of visual culture, pulling from the digital repositories of more than 200 institutions across the globe including libraries, archives, and museums such as the Smithsonian Institution, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“Around this time last year I had the idea to gather all the images in the Public Domain Review into a separate archive, in a way freeing these images from their textual homes and placing them front and center for easier discovery, comparison, and appreciation,” Adam Green, PDR’s editor-in-chief, told Hyperallergic.
He added that the new website creates an “‘image-first’ approach” to the publication’s content, as each image includes links to related articles in the online journal.
Admitting that it’s difficult to pick from the archive’s thousands of digitally archived materials, Green noted that he has a “soft spot” for scientific analog images like Karl Blossfeldt’s 20th-century magnified photos of plants and 16th-century manuscript illustrations of comets. His favorites also include late 19th-century Victorian illustrations of magic tricks and stage illusions, photos of a German geometer’s polyhedral model collection taken in 1900, and Tom Seidmann-Freud’s leporine folk tale drawings.
Other fascinating finds on the database include early 20th-century color analysis charts by artist Emily Noyes Vanderpoel; 1970s artworks visualizing space colonization based on a 1974 essay by Princeton professor Gerard K. O’Neill; and black-and-white photographs exploring the curiously intricate art of orange peel sculptures. (This citrus rendition of a pig created in 1910 is absolutely glorious.)
A search tool on the website lets users sort the image results in different ways; for example, from largest to smallest, which is particularly useful for those looking for high-resolution visuals.
The archive will be updated every week with new materials, Green said, noting that additional features will be incorporated into the platform in the near future, such as the ability to browse by an image’s dominant color.
“We’re also really excited about working with others, research students, for example, to use our dataset to do really cool things in terms of visualization and novel ways of displaying the images,” Green said. “Not sure where that might go yet, but there is lots of potential.”
