Working with Public Domain Materials

The Public Domain. The materials presented here are all in the public domain in the United States, no longer restricted by copyright. That means you are free to copy, modify (edit, translate, etc.), distribute (online, in print, etc.), and perform the work (i.e. audio, video), even for commercial purposes. You can learn more about public domain in the United States at Duke Law School's Center for the Study of the Public Domain, and for a fascinating project involving public domain materials, see The Public Domain Review.

Working with the Public Domain. Because most public domain materials are materials published before 1928, they are generally outdated and not appropriate for direct use as educational materials. They are, however, extremely valuable for historical investigation, which is the goal of this presentation. In addition, you can extract and/or edit materials from old sources to make them directly useful in today's classrooms, taking appropriate care in the process. Working with PDFs is a fast and easy way to extract and re-present public domain materials in ways that can be useful to students today.

PDF Books in the Public Domain. The best place to start looking for PDF books in the public domain is at the Internet Archive. If your university is a member of Hathi Trust, you can also download PDFs from Hathi Trust. In addition, Google Books sometimes has public domain books not available at the Archive or Hathi (just make sure to set your search parameter to "full view" for books in the public domain). You can also find public domain books available at other websites such as European digital libraries, etc. For children's books, the University of Florida's Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature is a remarkable resource (use the "Print" option to generate a PDF of any book).

Editing PDFs. Once you have the PDF of a book, you can then select specific pages from the book, turning your selection into a PDF of its own. You can then combine those PDFs into new PDF anthologies, like the anthology I created of the African Folktales in Andrew Lang's Fairy Books. Adobe software allows you to edit PDFs in this way, although I prefer to use Sejda, which is less expensive. If you work on a Mac computer, the Mac Preview tool is also a handy PDF editor!

Google Drive for PDFs. As you may have already seen, I use Google Drive to store my PDFs. I find Google Drive to be ideal for this purpose: I can assign permissions to specific files or entire folders, I can link to specific PDF files, and, most importantly, I can upload revised versions of a PDF without breaking the links by using the "manage versions" feature.

Share Your Work. If you have created a public domain resource by remixing public domain materials, you can share your work at the Internet Archive! Just create a free account, and then upload your PDF to the Archive; for example, here's a PDF I created of African Proverbs and Riddles in the Public Domain which I have uploaded to the Archive. If you create a website, then add your website address to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

Creative Commons Licenses. If you add materials to your public domain packet or anthology — that might be commentary or notes, questions for your students, specific assignments — you can assign a Creative Commons license to those materials. If you want to put your materials into the public domain, you can use a CC0 license (as I have done here; see the footer on each page of this website), but you can also choose a more restrictive license, such as one that requires attribution or which limits reuse to non-commercial purposes. Find out more at the Creative Commons website.