New York: The New York Public Library announcedyesterday that 180,000 out-of-copyright materials from its digital collections are now available for download, no permission required. This is, according to the NYPL, “intended to facilitate sharing, research and reuse by scholars, artists, educators, technologists, publishers, and Internet users of all kinds.” The library added that “subsequently digitized public domain collections will be made available in the same way, joining a growing repository of open materials.”
In addition, the library is now accepting applications for a new “Remix Residency” to encourage new uses of the digital collections, which includes a $2,000 stipend and access to a work space in one of the NYPL’s research study rooms at the flagship Schwarzman building on Fifth Avenue. (The deadline is February 19.)Some of the new materials that have been made available through the library’s digital collections website include Berenice Abbott’s series of photographs of New York for the Federal Art Project; Farm Security Administration photographs by Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Gordon Parks, among others; manuscripts by the likes of Walt Whitman and Nathaniel Hawthorne; and a number of Medieval and Renaissance illuminated manuscripts from Western Europe.We wrote about the NYPL’s extensive holdings of photographs in its pictures collection back in November.
source:artnews