Open Educational Resources (OER)

Why would I want to look for course materials in the public domain?

Unlike openly licensed materials, public domain materials have no legal restrictions on their use (though of course, there is an ethical, academic obligation to cite your sources). Public domain materials may be right for your course if you are looking for older materials such as art, literature, or other historical materials that may help provide context for more current work in your discipline.

Tips for Using Public Domain Materials

Always look for copyright, terms of use, or permissions statements. Even if a museum, library, or archive is making its materials available online, you should verify that the object is in the public domain.
If an item description does not include its copyright status and you really want to use it, contact the organization and ask.
Always cite the author and source of the content you are using.
Cite and link to any item you have downloaded. Many institutions require you to give them credit through a citation and link. But even if not required it is always a good practice to source where and when you obtained materials.

Public Domain and Open Culture Sites

Digital Public Library of America
The Digital Public Library of America brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. It strives to contain the full breadth of human expression, from the written word, to works of art and culture, to records of America’s heritage, to the efforts and data of science. DPLA aims to expand this crucial realm of openly available materials, and make those riches more easily discovered and more widely usable and used.
Europeana
Multi-lingual online collection of millions of digitized items from European museums, libraries, archives and multi-media collections.
OpenGLAM: Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums
OpenGLAM is an initiative run by Open Knowledge that promotes free and open access to digital cultural heritage held by Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums.
Open Culture
"The best free cultural and educational media on the web." Contents includes Audiobooks, eBooks, Language sources, Textbooks, MOOCs, Movies, and online courses.
The Public Domain Review
Founded in 2011, The Public Domain Review is an online journal and not-for-profit project dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas.

In particular, as our name suggests, the focus is on works which have now fallen into the public domain, that vast commons of out-of-copyright material that everyone is free to enjoy, share, and build upon without restriction. Our aim is to promote and celebrate the public domain in all its abundance and variety, and help our readers explore its rich terrain – like a small exhibition gallery at the entrance to an immense network of archives and storage rooms that lie beyond.
DigitalMeetsCulture
Interactive magazine about new technologies meeting culture worldwide. Information for digital art, heritage, digitization, photography, projects. It is conceived as a meeting place between technologies and arts & humanities.
Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University
The public domain is the realm of material—ideas, images, sounds, discoveries, facts, texts—that is unprotected by intellectual property rights and free for all to use or build upon. Our economy, culture and technology depend on a delicate balance between that which is, and is not, protected by exclusive intellectual property rights. Both the incentives provided by intellectual property and the freedom provided by the public domain are crucial to the balance.
Brain Pickings
An inventory of cross-disciplinary interestingness, spanning art, science, design, history, philosophy, and more.
Communia: The European thematic Network on the Digital Public Domain
The COMMUNIA Thematic Network has been working for over three years at becoming a European point of reference for theoretical analysis and strategic policy discussion of existing and emerging issues concerning the public domain in the digital environment - as well as related topics, including, but not limited to, alternative forms of licensing for creative material; open access to scientific publications and research results; management of works whose authors are unknown (i.e. orphan works).
Rijksmuseum - Amsterdam
Interactive website that has more than 2000,000 high resolution images with online tools that allow users to manipulate, clip, and remix the images.
Google Cultural Institute
A partnership between Google and over 250 museums, archives, and cultural heritage institutions. Collections include more than 40,000 images in high-resolution gigapixel format. Images include both those in public domain and those still under copyright so be sure to check the status of each work.
National Gallery of Art - NGA Images
Search, browse, share, or doenload over 43,000 images. With the launch of NGA Images, the National Gallery of Art implements an open access policy for digital images of works of art that the Gallery believes to be in the public domain. Images of these works are now available free of charge for any use, commercial or non-commercial. Users do not need to contact the Gallery for authorization to use these images.
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York
Over 4000,000 public domain images. Part of the Open Access for Scholarly Content (OASC) Initiative.
New York Public Library Digital Collections
More than 800,000 digital objects, including drawings, illuminated manuscripts, maps, photographs, posters, prints, and rare books.