Take This, It’s Free: Public Domain Clearance Project at Texas A&M University-Commerce Libraries
Abstract
In early 2016, Texas A&M University-Commerce Libraries archivist Michael Barera and digital collections librarian Adam Northam developed a project to identify images that have entered the public domain from a selected digital collection documenting university history. The project’s main goals were to make public domain materials in our Northeast Texas Digital Collections more widely accessible and serve researchers by helping them discern copyright status more clearly, and also to determine if clearly identifying such materials as being in the public domain would direct more traffic back to the source material in our Digital Collections.