Recommended Web Sites: Public Domain

A collaboration of the Center for the Public Domain and The University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill to provide public domain material. Arranged by the Dewey Decimal System.

Music · Pronunciation · Speeches · Spoken Wikipedia

More than 2 million freely usable media files including Images Animations · Diagrams · Drawings · Maps (Atlas) · Paintings · Photos · Symbols and

A union catalog of electronic books, texts, and documents. A large library of electronic books. Site provides links to more than 139,000 full-text digital books free.

This site provides free audio books from the public domain and strives to make all public domain books available as free audio books.

Free online access to over 10,000 music and spoken-word recordings produced in the U.S. between the years 1901 and 1925 from the Library of Congress and Sony.

This site makes audio ebooks available for some of the same great literature available in plain text. Books are human read and computer generated.

Browse AMS books by author or subject.

The web's largest catalog of books whose authors have made them available for free.

List of guides for ebooks, promotional aids, standards, and software. Hyperlinks to many sources.

A website that stimulates the action of page turning with shockwave plug-in. Includes text, archival forms, books, manuscripts, maps, newspaper, magazines, patents, musical scores, sound recordings, photographs, and stamps.

A large collection of illustrated antique books. New books and translations are added each week.

A collection of online books for children that includes rare books, grants, teacher resources, phonics, home schooling, puzzles, riddles, mazes, coloring books, and games.

The purpose of this site is to build up the church by making classic Christian writings available and also to promote use.

Contains over 165,000 titles gathered from various publishers on various platforms.

Offers a large directory of free downloadable ebooks online. Browse by categories or search.

This site allows you to search full-text of books, browse books online, and buy or borrow books from a library.

This site offers a collection of digital books for children that represent historical and contemporary books from throughout the world.

An open access text archive that is open to the community for contributions of any text type. Site was founded to build an Internet library with purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format.(Tutorial)

A site that offers over 3,700 online free books. Users may search, read, download, and order from the site.

Lists over 25,000 free books on the web.

An open access publishing collective of books and journals of critical thought, primarily in the humanities and social sciences.

A collection of over 20,000 free books in Project Guttenberg. This site offers one of the first and largest single collection of free electronic books and strives to use the latest technology. Collection includes audio books, CD/DVD project, as well as digitized sheet music.(Tutorial)

A collection of full-text books from the Smithsonian Institution.

A collection of over 2100 publicly available ebooks from University of Virginia’s Virgo center. Includes a wide variety of literature.

From the Open Collections Program, a collection that focuses on women’s roles in the US economy and provides access to digitized historical, manuscript, and image resources selected from Harvard University’s library and museum collection.

The world’s largest digital archive of PDF ebooks and edocuments. Offers a collection of more than 500,000 ebooks and edocuments available for a fee. There is, however, a free public access section containing links to over 75,000 ebooks.

Categories include government resources from 40 federal agencies on the topics of Arts, Educational Technology, Foreign Languages, Health and Safety, Language Arts, Mathematics, Physical Education, Science, Social Studies, and Vocational Education. Lesson plans. K-12

Finds lesson plans and activities for Arts, Health and Fitness, Math, Reading and Language Arts, Science and Technology, Social Studies, Pre-K-2, and Library Media. (K-12)

This site is designed to provide teachers of all grade levels lesson plans for their content area. It even has lessons for early childhood teachers. This site could be used for teaching about the different seasons and holidays. This site could also be used to find lesson plans or it could be used as a guide when writing lessons. It has several “lesson plan guides” teachers can use.

Free images for the classroom.

Free clip art, photos and animation.

Over 40,000 images on all topics.

Web design and graphics generator tool. Completely free.

100’s of clip art and animations.

Mostly copyright free images produced by dozens of government agencies. Gigantic. Includes images from Library of Congress, NOAA, NASA, National Park Service, Smithsonian, etc.

A collaboration of the Center for the Public Domain and The University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill to provide public domain material. Arranged by the Dewey Decimal System.

NYPL Digital Gallery provides access to over 550,000 images digitized from primary sources and printed rarities in the collections of The New York Public Library, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints and photographs, illustrated books, printed ephemera, and more.

The Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image (SCETI), within the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, provides digital access to over 12,000 images from more than a dozen collections of rare books, manuscripts, papyri, photographs and sheet music. Most, but not all, are copyright free.

Library of several hundred freely available textures, arranged by category. Including wood, stone, nature, metal, water, fabric, organic, cloud, skin and fur, etc.

The US Geological Survey (USGS) has set out to provide a "one-stop collection of videos, photography, and other imagery" through their Multimedia Gallery. This site could be very beneficial to students and educators due to the richness of the USGS collections, with all USGS images in the public domain. The USGS Multimedia Gallery is divided by format into three sections: Photography and Images, Videos and Animations, and Audio and Podcasts. Each section holds numerous collections, such as Natural Hazards, Climate Change, and Biology, which reflect the diverse subject areas covered by units in the USGS. A brief description of each image, video, or podcast is provided, including title, location, date, and tags.

More than 2 million freely usable media files including Images Animations · Diagrams · Drawings · Maps (Atlas) · Paintings · Photos · Symbols and Sound Music · Pronunciation · Speeches · Spoken Wikipedia

ccMixter is a community music site featuring remixes licensed under Creative Commons where you can listen to, sample, mash-up, or interact with music in whatever way you want

More than 2,000 free downloads of scores in PDF file for all musical instruments.

A guide to free sheet music on the internet.

A source on independent music. Lots for free downloads.

Free Hymn Texts, Tunes, and Sheet Music; Lectionary and Psalter Resources; Audio and Data CDs; Free Downloads.

Explains how to find and recognize public domain music. Provides a list of public domain songs. Site will also sell reproductions.

Free online access to over 10,000 music and spoken-word recordings produced in the U.S. between the years 1901 and 1925 from the Library of Congress and Sony.

Contains royalty free music and free music and sound effects. Ringtones.

A reference site to help the ordinary person identify music and songs in the public domain. Includes song lists, recordings, reference information.

The Petrucci Music Library is a wiki-based repository of musical scores. With a goal of creating "a virtual library containing all public domain music scores, as well as scores from composers who are willing to share their music with the world without charge," the project is quite ambitious. At present, more than 26,000 works are available in more than 66,000 scores and parts. Additionally, performers have contributed a number of recordings in MP3 format to accompany the scores. The collection is both browsable (composer, time period, nationality, or genre/instrumentation) and searchable (keyword, composer, or database index number). Scores are available in downloadable PDF format. Scanning quality is generally good. Metadata are acceptable but uneven across the database with some items described accurately while others lack authoritativeness and specificity. Because of its public domain scope, content does not necessarily reflect current scholarly editorial trends.

Mostly American compositions in MIDI format from the 1800s arranged by composer, era, and style.

Contains texts and some midi recordings.

Mostly classical music in PDF files. Restricted to two downloads per day.

links to free plays available online.

The Freesound Project is a collaborative database of Creative Commons licensed sounds. Freesound focusses only on sound, not songs. This is what sets freesound apart from other splendid libraries like ccMixter.

Public Domain Sounds – Free Sound Library.

A collaboration of the Center for the Public Domain and The University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill to provide public domain material. Arranged by the Dewey Decimal System.

The portal to more than 6,000 lectures and 8,300 videos on all topics - all free - can be used to supplement the classroom or learn something new of personal interest.

More than 2 million freely usable media files including images, sound, and videos.
Wikimedia Commons is a database of 20,304,351 freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute.