The public domain review

Self-portrait

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 sugggests, 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.

With a focus on the surprising, the strange, and the beautiful, we hope to provide an ever-growing cabinet of curiosities for the digital age, a kind of hyperlinked Wunderkammer – an archive of content which truly celebrates the breadth and diversity of our shared cultural commons and the minds that have made it.

(http://publicdomainreview.org/about/)

Description

The Public Domain Review is an online journal dedicated to showcasing and promoting a variety of public domain works that people can consult and use without restriction. The portal serves as a gateway to a vast network of archives of all kinds of works, from timeless classics to little-known materials of peculiar characteristics, forming a sort of cabinet of curiosities of the digital age. The collection is composed of images, audio, books, and films.

The Public Domaine Review is currently edited by Adam Green. The project started in 2011 conducted by the Open Knowledge Foundation, which is dedicated to promoting open content in all its forms, by fostering free access to archives of libraries, museums, galleries and cultural institutions.

The site is divided into three general sections.

• The collections include archives of images, audio, books, and films, where relevant or curious materials are highlighted.
• The section devoted to essays publishes new material every two weeks, form academics, writers, artists and archivists.
• The third section, Curator's Choice, is made up of contributions from museum archives.

The collection makes available a broad range of materials from the XV century to the present time, such as anatomical illustrations, treaties of herbs, astral charts, symbols, fashion, full books, experiments and observations, old sayings, fairy tales, etc. The film collection shows early commercials, experimental animation, odd rescued films, and first adaptations of literature classics, such as the 1910 film adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

To promote the site, a newsletter is sent to registered users with the latest content. Also, there is a guide that explains how to find interesting pieces of work of public domain,so to encourage users to explore and find interesting material by themselves.

Interview

Adam Green http://dpya.org/en/index.php/Adam_Green

Links

URL: http://publicdomainreview.org/

Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://publicdomainreview.org/

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Public_Domain_Review