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Public Domain
This Research Guide provides information on the Public Domain and suggestions for resources to find public domain items.
What can I do with public domain materials?
Simply put, anything you want! Public domain works can be re-published, remixed, translated or tweaked into whatever form you like. There are countless ways you can use items in the public domain for your work, limited only by your imagination.
For example, original works by Jane Austen and Shakespeare are in the public domain. This is why you see so many film, stage and literary adaptations of their work. The Lion King is famously based on Hamlet and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies made its big-screen debut in 2016. Disney has used well-known, public domain fairy tales to Snow White, The Little Mermaid, Pinocchio, and more.
Finding Items in the Public Domain
These sites are good starting points for finding images, books and other items that are in the public domain.
- Creative Commons CC0 SearchSearch for free content in the public domain and under Creative Commons licenses.
- HathiTrustHathiTrust is a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries preserving 17+ million digitized items. This collection includes more than 45,000 items published in 1924 and newly in the public domain.
- Library of Congress- Free to Use and Reuse SetsThis page features items from the Library's digital collections that are free to use and reuse. The Library believes that this content is either in the public domain, has no known copyright, or has been cleared by the copyright owner for public use.
- LibriVoxFree public domain audiobooks.
- New York Public Library Public Domain CollectionsOver 180,000 items from the NYPL Digital Collections that are in the public domain.
- Project GutenbergProject Gutenberg offers over 40,000 free e-books, which can be read online or downloaded. These books are all in the public domain.
- Wikimedia Commons - Public DomainWorks from Wikimedia Commons that are no longer in copyright term or were never protected by copyright law.
Public Domain Images
- Flickr CommonsPublic collection of photographs and art works in the Public Domain drawn from museum and archival collections around the world. Click on the "Participating Institutions" link to find works from a particular museum, archive, or library.
- Smithsonian Institution Public Domain ImagesThe photos you see here are a sample of the more than 13 million images in some seven hundred collections in Smithsonian museums, archives, and research centers. These collections contain photographs collected from outside sources in addition to those taken by Smithsonian staff, and represent a broad range of subjects and themes in the fields of art, history, culture, and science.
- UnsplashAll photos published on Unsplash are licensed under Creative Commons Zero which means you can copy, modify, distribute and use the photos for free, including commercial purposes, without asking permission from or providing attribution to the photographer or Unsplash.
- PixabayRoyalty free stock photos and video.
Public Domain or Openly Licensed Audio
- Free Music ArchiveSearch for royalty-free music by genre.
- SoundCloudSoundCloud is a large music and audio streaming database. To find openly available items on SoundCloud, search for content that is openly licensed and/or available for download. The SoundCloud search allows you to filter and limit the results to specifically licensed content. Clicking through to the artist or track page to view the license details.
- Dig CC MixterMusicians use this site to submit and openly license their work to be re-mixed, used for videos, podcasts or school projects.
- MusOpenCollection of recordings available to the public for free, without copyright restrictions.