Boston Public Library makes thousands of images available free online

classic photo of a woman holding a tea cup
Photo by Suzy Hazelwood on Pexels.com

Check out this article excerpt from the Boston Globe, and read the whole article right here!

These are images you and your students can use in classrooms, people can use for projects, for advertising, for all kinds of things! It’s so great to see more freely available and accessible material for us all!!!

“The Boston Public Library has made more than 8,000 photos, ranging from pictures documenting the construction of the McKim library building in Copley Square to 19th-century daguerreotypes, publicly available on Wikimedia Commons, according to library officials.

The Boston Public Library images are part of a broader effort by the Digital Public Library of America to provide greater access to “historical materials from libraries and museums across the country,” Boston library officials said in a statement Thursday.

Wikimedia Commons offers images free of charge on the Internet, according to its website.

The Digital Public Library of America facilitated the partnership between the Boston Public Library and Wikimedia Commons, library officials said. The Digital Public Library of America began working with Wikimedia Commons in 2019, the Digital Public Library said in a statement on its website.

Boston Public Library’s digital repository services manager, Eben English, said the first batch of photos were chosen because they were easily identifiable as being in the public domain or photos whose copyright was owned by the library.

“In this case the images are all in the public domain so… while we own the original paper copies or the physical copies of the images themselves, we don’t really have any ownership of the content, meaning intellectual or artistic content,” English said in a phone interview. “There’s no reason why we wouldn’t share them…. I think they belong to everybody, so we want to make them accessible to everybody as well.”

The images uploaded to Wikimedia are among the most significant photos in the library’s archives, the statement said, and include some documenting the early history of the Boston Red Sox, 19th-century daguerreotypes, portraits of indigenous peoples taken in the late 1800s in the American West, and Boston photos considered newsworthy.”

Check out the rest of this article for more details!