Creative Commons » Open Knowledge Foundation

Guide to Finding Interesting Public Domain Works Online by the Open Knowledge Foundation

Jane Park — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 19:01:54 +0000

The Open Knowledge Foundation has published a nifty guide on the basics of Finding Interesting Public Domain Works Online. You can skim the guide in well under ten minutes, and it includes useful links and accompanying descriptions to online collections where PD works can be found, including Europeana, the Internet Archive, and Project Gutenberg. It also contains quite a few references to Creative Commons and succinct explanations of the relevant CC tools, such as the Public Domain Mark and the CC0 Public Domain Dedication. The guide, like all articles at The Public Domain Review, is available for reuse under CC BY.

Bibliotheca Buloviana (Ausschnitt) / Georg Daniel Heumann / Public Domain

Launch of The Public Domain Review website

Timothy Vollmer — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 17:46:55 +0000

By Dr Julius Neubronner [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

We’re pleased to see the launch of The Public Domain Review. The Review is a website with weekly updates in which scholars, writers, artists, librarians and others present an interesting or curious work (including films, photographs, texts and audio) from the public domain and write short accompanying articles about it that provide background, context, history, or other commentary or criticism. There are already several articles up on the site. The Review is also accepting submissions.

The Public Domain Review aspires to become a bounteous gateway into the whopping plenitude that is the public domain, helping our readers to explore this rich terrain by surfacing unusual and obscure works, and offering fresh reflections and unfamiliar angles on material which is more well known.

The Public Domain Review will highlight public domain materials from Wikimedia Commons, The Internet Archive, Flickr’s The Commons, and other sites. While all the multimedia content featured on the site is in the public domain, the reviews themselves are published under the Creative Commons Attribution license.

Congratulations to editors Adam Green and Jonathan Gray on launching this fascinating site that will share and celebrate the vast wonders of the public domain! You can sign up for updates, or follow on Twitter.

Open Knowledge Conference 2011

Mike Linksvayer — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 18:52:52 +0000

The Open Knowledge Foundation’s annual conference, OKCon, is next week in Berlin. They’ve put together an amazing program featuring some of the most exciting projects and speakers in the free/libre/open universe beyond software — though free software is not unrepresented — Richard Stallman is giving what should be an extremely interesting talk on Free/Libre Software and Open Data.

I’m very happy that CC’s policy coordinator, Timothy Vollmer, will be co-presenting with the OKF’s Jordan Hatcher on Open Data Licensing. This follows up on my and Jordan‘s presentations at the Share-PSI workshop in May.

I would also like to highlight sessions by CC project leads from France, Guatemala, and Poland:

Communia, the international association on the digital public domain (Melanie Dulong de Rosnay)
Taking the pulse of global Initiatives using technology to promote transparency and accountability (Renata Avila)
On the road to open data in Poland – where are we now? (Alek Tarkowski)

Go if you can!

Open Milton

Jane Park — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 00:31:53 +0000

Happy Belated Birthday John Milton! The poet that English majors belabor and grow to know so well turned 400 earlier this week, and to celebrate, the Open Knowledge Foundation launched Open Milton. What is Open Milton?

Open Milton is “an open set of Milton’s works, together with ancillary information and tools, in a form designed for reuse. The Open Milton project has two main objectives:

Provide the works of John Milton, along with textual apparatus and tools all in an open form.
Deliver this material as a knowledge package that allows for easy deployment, redistribution and reuse.

Specifically [they] provide a full open set of Milton’s works along with ancillary material, a variety of tools and a python API. In addition to the works themselves there is a chronology, statistics, a concordance and search facilities.”

The great thing about Open Milton is that it is a specialized resource, organized and pieced together in novel and thoughtful ways—but it doesn’t prevent you or anyone else from tinkering with it, adding to it, and making it better. Why? Because it’s licensed under CC BY and therefore discoverable (machine-readable), even if it doesn’t conform to some aggregator’s notion of a proper resource. Open Milton is an excellent example for self-publishing; anyone can give their work the advantage of open licensing.