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Dear all — I’m writing to share a message from Tony Marx of the New York Public Library, about NYPL’s major release of images, documents, and metadata in the public domain — and to make sure you don’t miss this code4lib email by Ashley Blewer of NYPL Labs, outlining the collections and terrific demo projects in greater detail, and describing NYPL's exciting new “Remix Residency” program: https://listserv.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=CODE4LIB;1b2ad692.1601 Hearty congratulations, NYPL friends! As for the rest of us — let’s dig in! — Bethany Bethany Nowviskie Director of the Digital Library Federation at CLIR & Research Associate Professor of Digital Humanities at UVa diglib.org<http://diglib.org> | clir.org<http://clir.org> | engl.virginia.edu<http://engl.virginia.edu> | nowviskie.org<http://nowviskie.org> Begin forwarded message: Dear Colleagues: Happy New Year. I hope you had a wonderful holiday. I write to share a development at the Library that will make our digital collections increasingly accessible and usable by the public. As described in a piece published today in The New York Times entitled "New York Public Library Invites a Deep Digital Dive<http://click.email.nypl.org/?qs=5d2854f2a3775de2d3140742fbe5670af7d34902d4199a1b45f3a977f3d6f8777108560c62299f08>," the Library has proactively evaluated hundreds of thousands of its digital images and documents and determined that 180,000 of them do not have any known U.S. copyright restrictions. This means that these images are essentially in the public domain, and today we are releasing high-resolution versions along with improved metadata at nypl.org/publicdomain<http://click.email.nypl.org/?qs=5d2854f2a3775de2b1175b81628e9cf418c9dfb78c078cddde9b93d2089d05ebebc339253a18b37e>—setting the standard for how to make public domain materials available. What does this mean specifically? It means researchers, artists, students, and anyone else can legally use these digital properties however they’d like, generating new works and eventually breathing new life into the collection of NYPL. The list of items is extremely varied and rich—from Farm Security Administration photos by Walker Evans, to manuscripts by Thoreau and Hawthorne, to correspondence from Hamilton and Jefferson, to over 20,000 maps from around the world. As the Times mentions, the Library is even offering "Remix Residencies" to encourage artists, information designers, software developers, data scientists, and others to make transformative and creative use of these collections. What does it mean more broadly? It means that we are making significant progress on our aggressive program to make NYPL’s renowned research collections as accessible as possible. In addition to this public release, the Library is constantly looking for resources and partners so it can digitize more of its collection items and make them available on nypl.org<http://click.email.nypl.org/?qs=5d2854f2a3775de2218e5a07c5b95b9953a46b6ec0690c20ec18be0a75293c1d132834613e00bcfc>. We will continue to work to this end, and keep you apprised of all new initiatives and projects. Here’s to a wonderful, productive 2016. Yours, Tony Anthony W. Marx President, The New York Public Library ############################ To unsubscribe from the DLF-ANNOUNCE list: write to: mailto:[log in to unmask] or click the following link: http://lists.clir.org/scripts/wa-CLIR.exe?SUBED1=DLF-ANNOUNCE&A=1