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| Chart of the Hand, by Dr Alesha Sivartha, published in 1898. |
Good news everyone! The good people at the Public Domain Review, have released a brand-new project, a database of thousands of public domain images, in high quality and best of all it's curated by their team of researchers so you can trust their work and the information provided by them.
I've been spending sometime looking through its tags and marvelling at the results. The Archive can be accessed directly here, and I will be adding it to my list of resources on the blog sidebar. In addition to being a cool resource, this has personally been a useful and much appreciated service. I'm a historian and one of the barriers I find to making historical material available is the monopolisation of historical photographs, sketches and paintings by a handful of massive stock footage companies who flood search engine results with previews of materials centuries old covered in watermarks offering to let you access a scene of peasants storming the Russian Army lines in Vienna in 1848 for a fee or annual subscription.
It's not the fees I object to, it's the paywalling of public information, art and history while they already have access to licensed material for revenue. I know it costs money to run a service, the main reason this blog and its associated platforms are infrequently updated is because I can't afford to devout my full time to them. But there are ways to earn revenue while making commonly owned materials publicly available.
The archive is an excellent example of how to do that. If you appreciate the time and effort the folks at the Review put into these projects, you can donate if you're in a financial position to do so. And if you see an image you really like and would like to display somewhere physical, then you can purchase a high quality print from them. Or you can download the image and print it yourself. The choice is yours, and nothing is being withheld for profit or reasons of control.
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| Perseus and the Head of Medusa, by Stuart Hall, published in 1824 |
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