LibGuides: Public Domain Media & Content: Public Domain Text Materials

Public Domain Publications & Manuscripts

Digital repositories and archives that hold public domain publications, manuscripts, and other textual materials.

California Digital Newspaper Collection
The CDNC project by U.C. Riverside has a growing collection of historical California newspapers published from 1846 - present, including the first California newspaper, the Californian, and the first daily California newspaper, the Daily Alta California. All newspapers published before January 1, 1926 are in the public domain and have no restrictions on use. Browse county, date, or newspaper title.
Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)
Includes digitized primary sources from libraries, archives, and cultural heritage institutions throughout the U.S. Some of the digitized items reside in the public domain. Check the Rights Information on each item record to confirm copyright status. Public domain works can be found by filtering your searches on "Unlimited Re-Use".
Getty: Open Content Program
The Getty provides access to more than 160,000 images of digitized artwork from its collections that are in the public domain. This includes photos, paintings, drawings, maps, text and manuscripts, and other artifacts.
Google Books: Free Books
Google Books provides full-text access to more than 10 million books in the public domain. This search tool limits results to just public domain works. Check these publications for photos, illustrations, maps, etc.
HathiTrust
HathiTrust is a partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of digitized publications from libraries and archives around the world. It includes many public domain and open access works, which are available to the public. Access to collections still under copyright are restricted to only certain libraries.
Internet Archive (Rights-Free)
The Internet Archive provides free access to millions of digitized books, images (photos, illustrations, cover art, maps, etc.), texts, audio recordings, videos, and software programs from around the world. Check the Rights field on each item record to identify public domain and Creative Commons-licensed works.
Library of Congress: Digital Collections
The digital collections comprise millions of items including books, newspapers, manuscripts, prints and photos, maps, musical scores, films, sound recordings and more. Many items are in the public domain. Check the Rights statement on each collection page and catalog item record.
Library of Congress: Free to Use and Reuse Sets
This portal provides access to a subset of LOC digital collections that are in the public domain, have no known copyright, or have been cleared by the copyright holder for public use. This includes books, newspapers, manuscripts, prints and photos, maps, musical scores, films, sound recordings and more.
National Library of Medicine: Digital Collections
NLM digital collections include public domain images, video, audio, maps, and text.
New York Public Library: Digital Collections
NYPL's Digital Collections includes over 300,000 public domain still images, textual works, cartographic materials, notated music, and digital images of 3D artifacts. This link filters specifically on public domain materials in the collection.
Project Gutenberg
Founded in 1971, Project Gutenbergwas the first single collection of free ebooks, with over 40,000 titles. Nearly all of Project Gutenberg's eBooks are in the public domain in the United States. For the rest, copyright permission has been granted by the copyright owner.