The NYPL Digital Gallery is a digital archive created by the New York Public Library that provides free access to a large collection of over 500,000 digitized images, the majority of which are in the public domain. It launched to the public on March 4, 2005.
The New York Public Library (NYPL) is a public library system in New York City. With nearly 53 million items and 92 locations, the New York Public Library is the second largest public library in the United States and the third largest in the world. It is a private, non-governmental, independently managed, nonprofit corporation operating with both private and public financing.
The public domain consists of all the creative works to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable.
NYPL Digital Gallery, according to the project description, "helps to fulfill the traditional mission of The New York Public Library to select, collect, preserve and make accessible 'the accumulated wisdom of the world, without distinction as to income, religion, nationality, or other human condition.' It offers broad public access to a wide range of historical and cultural documents that 'enable individuals to pursue learning at their own personal levels of interest, preparation, ability and desire, and help ensure the free trade in ideas and the right of dissent.'"
The site was "developed to provide free and open online access to thousands of images from the original and rare holdings of The Library. Spanning a wide range of visual media, NYPL Digital Gallery offers digital images of drawings, illuminated manuscripts, maps, photographs, posters, prints, rare illustrated books, and more. Encompassing the subject strengths of the vast collections of the Research Libraries, these materials represent the applied sciences, fine and decorative arts, history, performing arts, and social sciences."
Downloading and Licensing Images
Images may be freely downloaded for personal, research, and study purposes only.
As defined by NYPL, "commercial use is any use that brings value to the person or organization displaying the photograph to the public. It applies to commercial companies, nonprofit organizations, academic institutions, and individuals who use a reproduction of an image from NYPL in a book, magazine, newspaper, scholarly journal, CD-ROM, DVD, brochure, calendar, poster, flyer, postcard, documentary, TV show, feature film, video, exhibition, web site, promotional material, product, or advertisement."
Some concern has been raised over the library's assertion of usage and distribution control rights over the images it hosts, despite the lack of copyright status on the images due to expiration[citation needed]: " As the physical rights holder of this material, most of which is in the public domain for copyright purposes, the Library charges a usage fee to license an image for commercial use ... The usage fee is not a copyright fee. You are free to obtain a copy of these images from a source other than NYPL. Usage fees help ensure that the Library is able to continue to acquire, preserve and provide access to its collections." It is unclear whether the library may legally enforce these conditions of distribution for public domain works under US copyright law.[citation needed]
In library and archival science, digital preservation is a formal endeavor to ensure that digital information of continuing value remains accessible and usable. It involves planning, resource allocation, and application of preservation methods and technologies, and it combines policies, strategies and actions to ensure access to reformatted and "born-digital" content, regardless of the challenges of media failure and technological change. The goal of digital preservation is the accurate rendering of authenticated content over time. The Association for Library Collections and Technical Services Preservation and Reformatting Section of the American Library Association, defined digital preservation as combination of "policies, strategies and actions that ensure access to digital content over time." According to the Harrod's Librarian Glossary, digital preservation is the method of keeping digital material alive so that they remain usable as technological advances render original hardware and software specification obsolete.
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Related Research Articles
Copyright is a legal right, existing in many countries, that grants the creator of an original work exclusive rights to determine whether, and under what conditions, this original work may be used by others. This is usually only for a limited time. Copyright is one of two types of intellectual property rights, the other is industrial property rights. The exclusive rights are not absolute but limited by limitations and exceptions to copyright law, including fair use. A major limitation on copyright on ideas is that copyright protects only the original expression of ideas, and not the underlying ideas themselves.
Project Gutenberg (PG) is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks". It was founded in 1971 by American writer Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital library. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books. The project tries to make these as free as possible, in long-lasting, open formats that can be used on almost any computer. As of 23 June 2018, Project Gutenberg reached 57,000 items in its collection of free eBooks.
A photographer is a person who makes photographs.
The Internet Archive is a San Francisco–based nonprofit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge." It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, movies/videos, moving images, and millions of public-domain books. In addition to its archiving function, the Archive is an activist organization, advocating for a free and open Internet.
Clip art, in the graphic arts, is pre-made images used to illustrate any medium. Today, clip art is used extensively. Clip art comes in many forms, both electronic and printed. However, most clip art today is created, distributed, and used in an electronic form. Since its inception, clip art has evolved to include a wide variety of content, file formats, illustration styles, and licensing restrictions. Clip art is generally composed exclusively of illustrations, and does not include stock photography.
Copyright expiry in Australia depends on when a work was created, and on the type of work. Under the current law, copyright usually expires 70 years after the death of the author, or for anonymous works, 70 years from the date of publication. Crown copyright expires 50 years after publication. The law has evolved over the years, and previously photographs were treated differently from other works. Anonymous works and photographs created before 1955 are no longer under copyright. For non-photographic works created before 1955, where the author is known, the copyright expires 50 years after the death of the author.
Google Books is a service from Google Inc. that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical character recognition (OCR), and stored in its digital database. Books are provided either by publishers and authors, through the Google Books Partner Program, or by Google's library partners, through the Library Project. Additionally, Google has partnered with a number of magazine publishers to digitize their archives.
The California Digital Library (CDL) was founded by the University of California in 1997. In collaboration with the ten University of California Libraries and other partners, CDL has assembled one of the world's largest digital research libraries. CDL facilitates the licensing of online materials and develops shared services used throughout the UC system. Building on the foundations of the Melvyl Catalog, CDL has developed one of the largest online library catalogs in the country and works in partnership with the UC campuses to bring the treasures of California's libraries, museums, and cultural heritage organizations to the world. CDL continues to explore how services such as digital curation, scholarly publishing, archiving and preservation support research throughout the information lifecycle.
Copyfraud refers to false copyright claims by individuals or institutions with respect to content that is in the public domain. Such claims are wrongful, at least under U.S. and Australian copyright law, because material that is not copyrighted is free for all to use, modify and reproduce. Copyfraud also includes overreaching claims by publishers, museums and others, as where a legitimate copyright owner knowingly, or with constructive knowledge, claims rights beyond what the law allows.
The Web Gallery of Art (WGA) is a virtual art gallery website. It displays historic European visual art, mainly from the Baroque, Gothic and Renaissance periods, available for educational and personal use.
Free content, libre content, or free information, is any kind of functional work, work of art, or other creative content that meets the definition of a free cultural work.
A digital library, digital repository, or digital collection, is an online database of digital objects that can include text, still images, audio, video, or other digital media formats. Objects can consist of digitized content like print or photographs, as well as originally produced digital content like word processor files or social media posts. In addition to storing content, digital libraries provide means for organizing, searching, and retrieving the content contained in the collection.
Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp., 36 F. Supp. 2d 191, was a decision by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, which ruled that exact photographic copies of public domain images could not be protected by copyright in the United States because the copies lack originality. Even though accurate reproductions might require a great deal of skill, experience and effort, the key element to determine whether a work is copyrightable under US law is originality.
Copyright Agencies are not-for-profit organisations charged with common activities including setting royalty rates, administering copyright registration databases, and issuing interpretations of copyright statutes. While some copyright agencies may also act as copyright collection societies, not all have that authority, and many copyright collection societies are only authorised by the government to manage schemes on their behalf and are completely independent.
The Stanford University Libraries Digital Image Collections is an online collection of digital images called Image Gallery, maintained by the Stanford University Libraries. The site provides access to over 50,000 digital images scanned from collections owned by the Stanford Libraries. Users can search image metadata, browse collections, and view images at high resolutions.
In July 2009, lawyers representing the National Portrait Gallery of London (NPG) sent an email letter warning of possible legal action for alleged copyright infringement to Derrick Coetzee, an editor/administrator of the free content multimedia repository Wikimedia Commons, hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation.
The Sophie Digital Library is a digital library and resource center for works produced by German-speaking women pre-17th century through the early 20th century, a group that has often been underrepresented in collections of historical printed works.
The digital commons are a form of commons involving the distribution and communal ownership of informational resources and technology. Resources are typically designed to be used by the community by which they are created. Examples of the digital commons include wikis, open-source software, and open-source licensing. The distinction between digital commons and other digital resources is that the community of people building them can intervene in the governing of their interaction processes and of their shared resources.
Romana Javitz was an American artist, librarian, and Superintendent of the Picture Collection at the New York Public Library.
