Source Material
What's this?
Looking for something to include in a project? A sound clip? Video footage as a background? Some soundtrack music? This might be a good starting place.
Copyright Warning
It is your responsibility to check the usage rights for the sources you select. Some have expired copyrights, others are free to use for education, and others may have further restrictions. Once you find what you want to use, check the rights provided on that source's page.
Images
Unsplash - The internet’s source of freely-usable images. Powered by creators everywhere.
Shutterstock - Shutterstock has both copyrighted and free material. This link starts you with search terms that return free to use images. Just add you search terms to the end of the words already there.
Pixabay - over 2.6 million high quality stock images, videos and music shared by contributors
Pexels - Search through thousands of royalty free images on Pexels. You can use all images for free, even for commercial use. All images are completely royalty free and licensed under the Pexels license. Use them for any project you want. This includes blogs, websites, apps, art or other commercial use cases.
Video Sources
Nation Screening Room - The National Screening Room showcases the riches of the Library’s vast moving image collection, designed to make otherwise unavailable movies, both copyrighted and in the public domain, freely accessible to the viewers worldwide. The majority of movies in the National Screening Room are freely available as both 5 mb MP4 and ProRes 422 MOV downloads.
Prelinger Archives - Prelinger Archives was founded in 1983 by Rick Prelinger in New York City. Over the next twenty years, it grew into a collection of over 60,000 "ephemeral" (advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur) films. In 2002, the film collection was acquired by the Library of Congress, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division. Prelinger Archives remains in existence, holding approximately 11,000 digitized and videotape titles (all originally derived from film) and a large collection of home movies, amateur and industrial films acquired since 2002
Library of Congress, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division - The Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division (MBRS) is responsibile for the acquisition, cataloging and preservation of the Library's motion picture and television collections. The Moving Image Research Center to provides access and information services to an international community of film and television professionals, archivists, scholars and researchers.
Free Movies on Line: Open Culture List - Watch 1,150 movies free online. Includes classics, indies, film noir, documentaries and other films, created by some of our greatest actors, actresses and directors. The collection is divided into the following categories: Comedy & Drama; Film Noir, Horror & Hitchcock; Westerns (many with John Wayne); Martial Arts Movies; Silent Films; Documentaries, and Animation.
Print Materials (and Audio Books)
Project Gutenberg - Project Gutenberg offers over 57,000 free eBooks. Choose among free epub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online. You will find the world's great literature here, with focus on older works for which copyright has expired. Thousands of volunteers digitized and diligently proofread the eBooks, for enjoyment and education.
Audio Books: Open Culture list of 900+ Titles - Download hundreds of free audio books, mostly classics, to your MP3 player or computer. Below, you'll find great works of fiction, poetry and non-fiction, by such authors as Twain, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Orwell, Vonnegut, Nietzsche, Austen, Shakespeare, Asimov, HG Wells & more.
eBooks: Open Culture list of 800+ Titles - Download 800 free eBooks to your Kindle, iPad/iPhone, computer, smart phone or ereader. Collection includes great works of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, including works by Asimov, Jane Austen, Philip K. Dick, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Neil Gaiman, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf & James Joyce.
Audio Sources
Library of Congress: The Joe Smith Collection - More than 25 years ago, retired music executive Joe Smith accomplished a Herculean feat—he got more than 200 celebrated singers, musicians and industry icons to talk about their lives, music, experiences and contemporaries. In 2012 Smith donated this treasure trove of unedited sound recordings to the nation’s library.
Library of Congress: Recorded Sound Collection - The recorded sound archive reflects the entire history of sound technology, from the first wax cylinders, through LPs and tape, to the latest compact audio discs.
Cross Category Sources
Library of Congress - Use the largest library in the world online. The Library is the main research arm of the U.S. Congress and the home of the U.S. Copyright Office.
Library of Congress MARC Distribution -The Library of Congress now offers an "open-access" provision, MDSConnect, at no cost to users. Their open-access service includes nearly 25 million MARC records, as distributed in the unabridged 2014 Retrospective file sets. These MDS record sets have been made available primarily for research and development usage. Records are available in three file formats - UTF8, MARC8 and XML.
Library of Congress: Free to Use and Reuse Sets - This page features items from the Library's digital collections that are free to use and reuse. The Library believes that this content is either in the public domain, has no known copyright, or has been cleared by the copyright owner for public use. Each set of content is based on a theme and is first featured on the Library's home page.
Library of Congress: Digital Collections - These sets are just a small sample of the Library's digital collections that are free to use and reuse. The digital collections comprise millions of items including books, newspapers, manuscripts, prints and photos, maps, musical scores, films, sound recordings and more. Whenever possible, each collection has its own rights statement which should be consulted for guidance on use. Learn more about copyright and the Library's collections.