Libraries & Archivists Are Digitizing 480,000 Books Published in 20th Century That Are Secretly in the Public Domain

in Archives, Books, Internet Archive | September 27th, 2019

Image by Jason “Textfiles” Scott, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

All books in the pub­lic domain are free. Most books in the pub­lic domain are, by def­i­n­i­tion, on the old side, and a great many aren’t easy to find in any case. But the books now being scanned and uploaded by libraries aren’t quite so old, and they’ll soon get much eas­i­er to find. They’ve fall­en through a loop­hole because their copy­right-hold­ers nev­er renewed their copy­right, but until recent­ly the tech­nol­o­gy was­n’t quite in place to reli­ably iden­ti­fy and dig­i­tal­ly store them.

Now, though, as Vice’s Karl Bode writes, “a coali­tion of archivists, activists, and libraries are work­ing over­time to make it eas­i­er to iden­ti­fy the many books that are secret­ly in the pub­lic domain, dig­i­tize them, and make them freely avail­able online to every­one.” These were pub­lished between 1923 and 1964, and the goal of this dig­i­ti­za­tion project is to upload all of these sur­pris­ing­ly out-of-copy­right books to the Inter­net Archive, a glimpse of whose book-scan­ning oper­a­tion appears above.

“His­tor­i­cal­ly, it’s been fair­ly easy to tell whether a book pub­lished between 1923 and 1964 had its copy­right renewed, because the renew­al records were already dig­i­tized,” writes Bode. “But prov­ing that a book hadn’t had its copy­right renewed has his­tor­i­cal­ly been more dif­fi­cult.” You can learn more about what it takes to do that from this blog post by New York Pub­lic Library Senior Prod­uct Man­ag­er Sean Red­mond, who first crunched the num­bers and esti­mat­ed that 70 per­cent of the titles pub­lished over those 41 years may now be out of copy­right: “around 480,000 pub­lic domain books, in oth­er words.”

The first impor­tant stage is the con­ver­sion of copy­right records into the XML for­mat, a large part of which the New York Pub­lic Library has recent­ly com­plet­ed. Bode also men­tions a soft­ware devel­op­er and sci­ence fic­tion author named Leonard Richard­son who has writ­ten Python scripts to expe­dite the process (includ­ing a match­ing script to iden­ti­fy poten­tial­ly non-renewed copy­rights in the Inter­net Archive col­lec­tion) and a bot that iden­ti­fies new­ly dis­cov­ered secret­ly pub­lic-domain books dai­ly. Richard­son him­self under­scores the neces­si­ty of vol­un­teers to take on tasks like seek­ing out a copy of each such book, “scan­ning it, proof­ing it, then putting out HTML and plain-text edi­tions.”

This work is now hap­pen­ing at Amer­i­can libraries and among vol­un­teers from orga­ni­za­tions like Project Guten­berg. The Inter­net Archive’s Jason Scott has also pitched in with his own resources, recent­ly putting out a call for more help on the “very bor­ing, VERY BORING (did I men­tion bor­ing)” project of deter­min­ing “which books are actu­al­ly in the pub­lic domain to either sur­face them on or help make a hitlist.” Of course, many more obvi­ous­ly stim­u­lat­ing tasks exist even in the realm of dig­i­tal archiv­ing. But then, each secret­ly pub­lic-domain book iden­ti­fied, found, scanned, and uploaded brings human­i­ty’s print and dig­i­tal civ­i­liza­tions one step clos­er togeth­er. What­ev­er comes out of that union, it cer­tain­ly won’t be bor­ing.

via Vice

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pub­lic Domain Day Is Final­ly Here!: Copy­right­ed Works Have Entered the Pub­lic Domain Today for the First Time in 21 Years

11,000 Dig­i­tized Books From 1923 Are Now Avail­able Online at the Inter­net Archive

British Library to Offer 65,000 Free eBooks

Down­load for Free 2.6 Mil­lion Images from Books Pub­lished Over Last 500 Years on Flickr

Free: You Can Now Read Clas­sic Books by MIT Press on Archive.org

The Library of Con­gress Launch­es the Nation­al Screen­ing Room, Putting Online Hun­dreds of His­toric Films

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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1,100 Classic Arcade Machines Added to the Internet Arcade: Play Them Free Online

in Internet Archive, Video Games | September 27th, 2018

Once we could hard­ly imag­ine such things as video games. Then, all of a sud­den, they appeared, though for years we had to go out to bars — and lat­er, pur­pose-built “arcades” filled with video game machines — in order to play them, and we paid mon­ey to do so. When they came into our homes in the form of con­soles we could hook up to our tele­vi­sion sets, we at first felt only dis­ap­point­ment: these ver­sions of Space Invaders, Don­key Kong, and Defend­er nei­ther looked nor felt much like the orig­i­nals into which we’d pumped so many coins. But only now that the tech­nol­o­gy in our homes has long since sur­passed most of the tech­nol­o­gy out­side them can we play faith­ful repro­duc­tions of all our old favorite games with­out going out to the arcade.

Not that many arcades still stand, although the Inter­net Archive has made up for that absence by build­ing the Inter­net Arcade, which we pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture a few years ago. Hav­ing made it pos­si­ble for us to play an enor­mous vari­ety of clas­sic arcade games free in our web browsers, the Inter­net Archive looks on its way to cre­at­ing not just the largest arcade in exis­tence but an infi­nite arcade, the kind that Borges would have imag­ined had he grown up in the video-game age.  Just last week, devel­op­ments in the soft­ware that pow­ers it allowed Inter­net Archive to add more than a thou­sand new machines to the Inter­net Arcade, from games for which we had to wait in line back in the day to obscu­ri­ties on which few of us have ever even laid eyes, let alone hands, before.

“The major­i­ty of these new­ly-avail­able games date to the 1990s and ear­ly 2000s, as arcade machines both became sig­nif­i­cant­ly more com­pli­cat­ed and graph­i­cal­ly rich,” writes the Inter­net Archive’s Jason Scott, “while also suf­fer­ing from the ever-present and home-based video game con­soles that would come to dom­i­nate gam­ing to the present day. Even fer­vent gamers might have missed some of these arcade machines when they were in the phys­i­cal world, due to low­er dis­tri­b­u­tion num­bers and short­er times on the floor.” You can explore the new wing of the Inter­net Arcade here, some of whose most pop­u­lar games include Puz­zle Bob­ble (bet­ter known in the West as Bust-a-Move), X‑Men, Met­al Slug 5, Teenage Mutant Nin­ja Tur­tles: Tur­tles in Time, and Street Fight­er Alpha 2. Maybe their sound and graph­ics no longer wow us as once they did, but the years have done noth­ing to dimin­ish their fun fac­tor — and for many of us, not hav­ing to spend our quar­ters will always be a feel­ing to savor.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Inter­net Arcade Lets You Play 900 Vin­tage Video Games in Your Web Brows­er (Free)

Free: Play 2,400 Vin­tage Com­put­er Games in Your Web Brows­er

Play a Col­lec­tion of Clas­sic Hand­held Video Games at the Inter­net Archive: Pac-Man, Don­key Kong, Tron and MC Ham­mer

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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200,000+ Vintage Records Being Digitized & Put Online by the Boston Public Library

in Archives, History, Internet Archive, Music | October 17th, 2017

It may be a great irony that our age of cul­tur­al destruc­tion and—many would argue—decline also hap­pens to be a gold­en age of preser­va­tion, thanks to the very new media and big data forces cred­it­ed with dumb­ing things down. We spend ample time con­tem­plat­ing the loss­es; archival ini­tia­tives like The Great 78 Project, like so many oth­ers we reg­u­lar­ly fea­ture here, should give us rea­sons to cel­e­brate.

In a post this past August, we out­lined the goals and meth­ods of the project. Cen­tral­ized at the Inter­net Archive—that mag­nan­i­mous cit­i­zens’ repos­i­to­ry of dig­i­tized texts, record­ings, films, etc.—the project con­tains sev­er­al thou­sand care­ful­ly pre­served 78rpm record­ings, which doc­u­ment the dis­tinc­tive sounds of the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry from 1898 to the late-1950s.

Thanks to part­ners like preser­va­tion com­pa­ny George Blood, L.P. and the ARChive of Con­tem­po­rary Music, we can hear many thou­sands of records from artists both famous and obscure in the orig­i­nal sound of the first mass-pro­duced con­sumer audio for­mat.

Just a few days ago, the Inter­net Archive announced that they would be joined in the endeav­or by the Boston Pub­lic Library, who, writes Wendy Hana­mu­ra, “will dig­i­tize, pre­serve” and make avail­able to the pub­lic “hun­dreds of thou­sands of audio record­ings in a vari­ety of his­tor­i­cal for­mats,” includ­ing not only 78s, but also LP’s and Thomas Edison’s first record­ing medi­um, the wax cylin­der. “These record­ings have nev­er been cir­cu­lat­ed and were in stor­age for sev­er­al decades, uncat­a­logued and inac­ces­si­ble to the pub­lic.”

The process, notes WBUR, “could take a few years,” giv­en the siz­able bulk of the col­lec­tion and the metic­u­lous meth­ods of the Inter­net Archive’s tech­ni­cians, who labor to pre­serve the con­di­tion of the often frag­ile mate­ri­als, and to pro­duce a num­ber of dif­fer­ent ver­sions, “from remas­tered to raw.” The object, says Boston Pub­lic Library pres­i­dent David Leonard, is to “pro­duce record­ings in a way that’s inter­est­ing to the casu­al lis­ten­er as well as to the hard-core music lis­ten­er in the research busi­ness.”

Thus far, only two record­ings from BPL’s exten­sive col­lec­tions have become avail­able—a 1938 record­ing called “Please Pass the Bis­cuits, Pap­py (I Like Moun­tain Music)” by W. Lee O’Daniel and His Hill­bil­ly Boys and Edvard Grieg’s only piano con­cer­to, record­ed by Fred­dy Mar­tin and His Orches­tra in 1947. Even in this tiny sam­pling, you can see the range of mate­r­i­al the archive will fea­ture, con­sis­tent with the tremen­dous vari­ety the Great 78 Project already con­tains.

While we can count it as a great gain to have free and open access to this his­toric vault of record­ed audio, it is also the case that dig­i­tal archiv­ing has become an urgent bul­wark against total loss. Cur­rent record­ing for­mats instant­ly spawn innu­mer­able copies of them­selves. The phys­i­cal media of the past exist­ed in finite num­bers and are sub­ject to total era­sure with time. “The sim­ple fact of the mat­ter,” archivist George Blood tells the BPL, “is most audio­vi­su­al record­ings will be lost. These 78s are dis­ap­pear­ing left and right. It is impor­tant that we do a good job pre­serv­ing what we can get to, because there won’t be a sec­ond chance.”

via WBUR

Relat­ed Con­tent:

25,000+ 78RPM Records Now Pro­fes­sion­al­ly Dig­i­tized & Stream­ing Online: A Trea­sure Trove of Ear­ly 20th Cen­tu­ry Music

The British Library’s “Sounds” Archive Presents 80,000 Free Audio Record­ings: World & Clas­si­cal Music, Inter­views, Nature Sounds & More

BBC Launch­es World Music Archive

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Apple’s Hypercard Software, the Innovative 1980s Precursor to Hypertext, Now Made Available by Archive.org

in Apple, Internet Archive, Software | August 14th, 2017

Archive.org is on a bit of a roll late­ly. After recent­ly mak­ing avail­able 25,000+ dig­i­tized 78rpm records from the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, they’ve turned around and put online Apple Hyper­card soft­ware. When Hyper­card was released in 1987, The New York Times pub­lished an arti­cle enti­tled “Apple to Intro­duce Unusu­al Soft­ware,” which began:

Apple Com­put­er Inc. will intro­duce an unusu­al data­base and man­age­ment infor­ma­tion pro­gram Tues­day that the com­pa­ny hopes will help it main­tain its lead in tech­nol­o­gy for mak­ing com­put­ers easy to use.

The new soft­ware, known as Hyper­card, will enable users of Apple’s Mac­in­tosh com­put­ers to orga­nize infor­ma­tion on com­put­er­ized file cards that can be linked to oth­er file cards in intri­cate ways. The pro­gram will be includ­ed for no charge with each Mac­in­tosh sold, start­ing this month.

Hyper­card made its appear­ance pre­cise­ly when Apple also released “a com­mu­ni­ca­tions device, known as a modem, that will enable the Mac­in­tosh to send doc­u­ments to and from fac­sim­i­le machines.” Some of us still use modems today. Hyper­card, not so much. At least not direct­ly.

As Hyper­card’s cre­ator Bill Atkin­son indi­cates above, Hyper­card start­ed work­ing with the hyper­text con­cept that’s now preva­lent on the web today. Think those links you find in HTML. On Archive.org, you can find and play with Hyper­card soft­ware, or what they call emu­lat­ed Hyper­card stacks. (They also host a library of emu­lat­ed soft­ware for the ear­ly Mac­in­tosh com­put­er). Read more about Archive.org’s Hyper­card project on their blog here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Com­put­er Sci­ence Cours­es

Free: You Can Now Read Clas­sic Books by MIT Press on Archive.org

How Brew­ster Kahle and the Inter­net Archive Will Pre­serve the Infi­nite Infor­ma­tion on the Web

Run Vin­tage Video Games (From Pac-Man to E.T.) and Soft­ware in Your Web Brows­er, Thanks to Archive.org

The Inter­net Arcade Lets You Play 900 Vin­tage Video Games in Your Web Brows­er (Free)

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25,000+ 78RPM Records Now Professionally Digitized & Streaming Online: A Treasure Trove of Early 20th Century Music

in History, Internet Archive, Music | August 9th, 2017

Every record­ing medi­um works as a metonym for its era: the term “LP” con­jures up asso­ci­a­tions with a broad musi­cal peri­od of clas­sic rock ‘n’ roll, soul, doo-wop, R&B, funk, jazz, dis­co etc.; we talk of the “CD era,” dom­i­nat­ed by dance music and hip-hop; the 45 makes us think of juke­box­es, din­ers, and sock-hops; and the cas­sette, well… at least one sub­genre of music, what John Peel called “sham­bling,” jan­g­ly, lo-fi pop, came to be known by the name “C86,” the title of an NME com­pi­la­tion, short for “Cas­sette, 1986.” (Read­ers of the mag­a­zine had to clip coupons and send mon­ey by postal mail to receive a copy of the tape.)

Soon, how­ev­er, few­er and few­er peo­ple will remem­ber the age of the 78rpm record, the pre­ferred vehi­cle for the music of the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry. From clas­si­cal and opera to blues, blue­grass, swing, rag­time, gospel, Hawai­ian, and hol­i­day nov­el­ties the 78 epit­o­mizes the sounds of its hey­day as much as any of the media men­tioned above.

While cas­settes recent­ly made a nos­tal­gic come­back, and turnta­bles are found in every big box store, we’re gen­er­al­ly not equipped to play back 78s. These are brit­tle records made from shel­lac, a resin secret­ed by bee­tles. They were often played on appli­ances that dou­bled as qual­i­ty par­lor fur­ni­ture.

Thanks now to the Inter­net Archive, that stal­wart of dig­i­tal cat­a­logu­ing and cura­tion, we can play twen­ty five thou­sand 78s and immerse our­selves in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, whether for research pur­pos­es or pure enjoy­ment. Pre­vi­ous efforts at preser­va­tion have “restored or remas­tered… com­mer­cial­ly viable record­ings” on LP or CD, writes The Great 78 Project, the archive’s vol­un­teer pro­gram to dig­i­tize musi­cal his­to­ry. The cur­rent effort seeks to go beyond pop­u­lar­i­ty and col­lect every­thing, from the rarest and strangest to the already his­toric. “I want to know what the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry sound­ed like,” writes Inter­net Archive founder Brew­ster Kahle, “Mid­west, dif­fer­ent coun­tries, dif­fer­ent social class­es, dif­fer­ent immi­grant com­mu­ni­ties and their loves and fears.”

You can hear sev­er­al selec­tions here, and thou­sands more at this archive of 78s uploaded by audio-visu­al preser­va­tion com­pa­ny, George Blood, L.P. Oth­er 78rpm archives from vol­un­teer col­lec­tors and the ARChive of Con­tem­po­rary Music are being dig­i­tized and uploaded as well. You’ll note the record­ings are often sub­merged in crack­le and hiss, and gen­er­al­ly lack bass and tre­ble (most play­back sys­tems of the time could not repro­duce the low­er and high­er ends of the audi­ble spec­trum). “We have pre­served the often very promi­nent sur­face noise and imper­fec­tions,” the Archive writes, “and includ­ed files gen­er­at­ed by dif­fer­ent sizes and shapes of sty­lus to facil­i­tate dif­fer­ent kinds of analy­sis.” Dif­fer­ent play­back sys­tems could pro­duce marked­ly dif­fer­ent sounds, and the record­ings were not always strict­ly 78rpm.

These con­di­tions of the trans­fer ensure that we rough­ly hear what the first audi­ences heard, though the records’ age and our pen­chant for 7 speak­er audio sys­tems intro­duce some new vari­ables. None of these record­ings were even made in stereo. The 78 peri­od, notes Yale Library, last­ed between 1898 and the late 1950s, when the 33 1/2 rpm long-play­ing record ful­ly edged out the old­er mod­el. For approx­i­mate­ly fifty years, these records car­ried record­ed music, sound, and speech into homes around the world. “What is this?” Kahle asks of this for­mi­da­ble dig­i­ti­za­tion project. “A ref­er­ence col­lec­tion? A collector’s dream? A dis­cov­ery radio sta­tion? The sound­track of the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry?” All of the above. To learn more about The Great 78 Project, includ­ing the tech­ni­cal details of the trans­fer and how you can care­ful­ly pack­age up and mail in your own 78rpm records, vis­it their Preser­va­tion page.

h/t @Ferdinand77

Relat­ed Con­tent:

BBC Launch­es World Music Archive

The British Library’s “Sounds” Archive Presents 80,000 Free Audio Record­ings: World & Clas­si­cal Music, Inter­views, Nature Sounds & More

DC’s Leg­endary Punk Label Dischord Records Makes Its Entire Music Cat­a­log Free to Stream Online

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Free: You Can Now Read Classic Books by MIT Press on Archive.org

in Books, Internet Archive, MIT | August 4th, 2017

FYI. At the end of May, Archive.org announced this on its blog:

For more than eighty years, MIT Press has been pub­lish­ing acclaimed titles in sci­ence, tech­nol­o­gy, art and archi­tec­ture.  Now, thanks to a new part­ner­ship between the Inter­net Archive and MIT Press, read­ers will be able to bor­row these clas­sics online for the first time. With gen­er­ous sup­port from Arca­dia, a char­i­ta­ble fund of Peter Bald­win and Lis­bet Raus­ing, this part­ner­ship rep­re­sents an impor­tant advance in pro­vid­ing free, long-term pub­lic access to knowl­edge.

“These books rep­re­sent some of the finest schol­ar­ship ever pro­duced, but right now they are very hard to find,” said Brew­ster Kahle, founder and Dig­i­tal Librar­i­an of the Inter­net Archive. “Togeth­er with MIT Press, we will enable the patrons of every library that owns one of these books to bor­row it online–one copy at a time.”

This joint ini­tia­tive is a cru­cial ear­ly step in Inter­net Archive’s ambi­tious plans to dig­i­tize, pre­serve and pro­vide pub­lic access to four mil­lion books, by part­ner­ing wide­ly with uni­ver­si­ty press­es and oth­er pub­lish­ers, authors, and libraries.…

We will be scan­ning an ini­tial group of 1,500 MIT Press titles at Inter­net Archive’s Boston Pub­lic Library facil­i­ty, includ­ing Cyril Stan­ley Smith’s 1980 book, From Art to Sci­ence: Sev­en­ty-Two Objects Illus­trat­ing the Nature of Dis­cov­ery, and Fred­er­ick Law Olm­st­ed and Theodo­ra Kimball’s Forty Years of Land­scape Archi­tec­ture: Cen­tral Park, which was pub­lished in 1973. The old­est title in the group is Arthur C. Hardy’s 1936 Hand­book of Col­orime­try.

Through­out the sum­mer, we’ve been check­ing in, wait­ing for the first MIT Press books to hit Archive.org’s vir­tu­al shelves. They’re now start­ing to arrive. Click here to find the begin­nings of what promis­es to be a much larg­er col­lec­tion.

As Brew­ster Kahle (founder of Inter­net Archive) explained it to Library Jour­nal, his orga­ni­za­tion is “basi­cal­ly try­ing to wave a wand over everyone’s phys­i­cal col­lec­tions and say, Blink! You now have an elec­tron­ic ver­sion that you can use” in what­ev­er way desired, assum­ing its per­mit­ted by copy­right. In the case of MIT Press, it looks like you can log into Archive.org and dig­i­tal­ly bor­row their elec­tron­ic texts for 14 days.

Archive.org hopes to dig­i­tize 1,500 MIT Press clas­sics by the end of 2017. Dig­i­tal col­lec­tions from oth­er pub­lish­ing hous­es seem sure to fol­low.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Brew­ster Kahle and the Inter­net Archive Will Pre­serve the Infi­nite Infor­ma­tion on the Web

An Archive of 3,000 Vin­tage Cook­books Lets You Trav­el Back Through Culi­nary Time

Enter a Huge Archive of Amaz­ing Sto­ries, the World’s First Sci­ence Fic­tion Mag­a­zine, Launched in 1926

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art Makes 140,000+ Artistic Images from Its Collections Available on Archive.org

in Art, Internet Archive, Museums | June 28th, 2017

As an Open Cul­ture read­er, you might already know the Inter­net Archive, often sim­ply called “Archive.org,” as an ever expand­ing trove of won­ders, freely offer­ing every­thing from polit­i­cal TV ads to vin­tage cook­books to Grate­ful Dead con­cert record­ings to the his­to­ry of the inter­net itself. You might also know the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art as not just a build­ing on Fifth Avenue, but a lead­ing dig­i­tal cul­tur­al insti­tu­tion, one will­ing and able to make hun­dreds of art books avail­able to down­load and hun­dreds of thou­sands of fine-art images usable and remix­able under a Cre­ative Com­mons license.

Now, the Inter­net Archive and the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art have teamed up to bring you a col­lec­tion of over 140,000 art images gath­ered by the lat­ter and orga­nized and host­ed by the for­mer.

Most every dig­i­tal vault in the Inter­net Archive offers a cul­tur­al and his­tor­i­cal jour­ney with­in, but the col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art offers an espe­cial­ly deep one, rang­ing his­tor­i­cal­ly from ear­ly 19th-cen­tu­ry India (The Plea­sures of the Hunt at the top of the post) to mid­cen­tu­ry New York (the pho­to of the mighty loco­mo­tive before the entrance to the 1939 World’s Fair above) and, in either direc­tion, well beyond.

Cul­tur­al­ly speak­ing, you can also find in the Met’s col­lec­tion in the Inter­net Archive every­thing from from Japan­ese inter­pre­ta­tions of French pho­tog­ra­phy (the wood­block print French Pho­tog­ra­ph­er above) to the Bel­gian inter­pre­ta­tion of Anglo-Amer­i­can cin­e­ma (the poster design for Char­lie Chap­lin’s Play Day below). You can dial in on your zone of inter­est by using the “Top­ics & Sub­jects,” whose hun­dreds of fil­ter­able options include, to name just a few, such cat­e­gories as Asia, wood, frag­ments, Lon­don, folios, and under­wear.

The col­lec­tion also con­tains works of the mas­ters, such as Vin­cent van Gogh’s 1887 Self-Por­trait with Straw Hat (as well as its obverse, 1885’s The Pota­to Peel­er), and some of the world’s great vis­tas, includ­ing Francesco Guardi’s 1765 ren­der­ing of Venice from the Baci­no di San Mar­co. If you’d like to see what in the col­lec­tion has drawn the atten­tion of most of its browsers so far, sort it by view count: those at work should beware that nudes and oth­er erot­i­cal­ly charged art­works pre­dictably dom­i­nate the rank­ings, but they do it along­side Naru­to Whirlpool, the Philoso­pher’s Stone, and Albert Ein­stein. Human inter­est, like human cre­ativ­i­ty, always has a sur­prise or two in store.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art Makes 375,000 Images of Fine Art Avail­able Under a Cre­ative Com­mons License: Down­load, Use & Remix

Down­load 464 Free Art Books from The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art

1.8 Mil­lion Free Works of Art from World-Class Muse­ums: A Meta List of Great Art Avail­able Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Download 200+ Free Modern Art Books from the Guggenheim Museum

in Art, Books, Internet Archive | April 26th, 2017

For at least half a decade now, New York’s Solomon R. Guggen­heim Muse­um has been dig­i­tiz­ing its exhi­bi­tion cat­a­logs and oth­er art books. Now you can find all of the pub­li­ca­tions made avail­able so far — not just to read, but to down­load in PDF and ePub for­mats — at the Inter­net Archive. If you’ve vis­it­ed the Guggen­heim’s non-dig­i­tal loca­tion on Fifth Avenue even once, you know how much effort the insti­tu­tion puts toward the preser­va­tion and pre­sen­ta­tion of mod­ern art, and that comes through as much in its print­ed mate­r­i­al as it does in its shows.

Among the more than 200 Guggen­heim art books avail­able on the Inter­net Archive, you’ll find one on a 1977 ret­ro­spec­tive of Col­or Field painter Ken­neth Noland, one on the ever-vivid icon-mak­ing pop artist Roy Licht­en­stein, and one on the exis­ten­tial slo­gans — “MONEY CREATES TASTE,” “PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT,” “LACK OF CHARISMA CAN BE FATAL” — sly­ly, dig­i­tal­ly insert­ed into the lives of thou­sands by Jen­ny Holz­er. Oth­er titles, like Expres­sion­ism, a Ger­man Intu­ition 1905–1920, From van Gogh to Picas­so, from Kandin­sky to Pol­lock, and painter Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky’s own Point and Line to Plane, go deep­er into art his­to­ry.

Where to start amid all these books of mod­ern (and even some of pre-mod­ern) art? You might con­sid­er first hav­ing a look at the books in the Inter­net Archive’s Guggen­heim col­lec­tion about the Guggen­heim itself: the hand­book to its col­lec­tion up through 1980, for instance, or 1991’s Mas­ter­pieces from the Guggen­heim Col­lec­tion: From Picas­so to Pol­lock, or the fol­low­ing year’s Guggen­heim Muse­um A to Z, or Art of this Cen­tu­ry: The Guggen­heim Muse­um and its Col­lec­tion from the year after that. But just as when you pay a vis­it to the Guggen­heim itself, you should­n’t wor­ry too much about what order you see every­thing in; the impor­tant thing is to look with inter­est.

Explore the col­lec­tion of 200+ art books and cat­a­logues here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load 448 Free Art Books from The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art

Down­load Over 300+ Free Art Books From the Get­ty Muse­um

The Guggen­heim Puts Online 1600 Great Works of Mod­ern Art from 575 Artists

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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