Library Home: Open Educational Resources (OERs): Open Media

Open Media Projects

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Digital libraries and other digital media collections contain a wide variety of content that is available for educational use - the examples posted here are a small sample of what is available. Many of these projects are maintained by academic libraries and not-for-profit institutions, and others are made available by commercial content providers. Reuse rights may vary - check for Creative Commons licenses or other rights statements before re-posting online content. The fair use provisions of copyright apply even if content is posted with use restrictions.

Primary Sources and Classic Texts

American Memory from the Library of Congress
"American Memory provides free and open access through the Internet to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience. It is a digital record of American history and creativity."
Avalon Project
"The Avalon Project will mount digital documents relevant to the fields of Law, History, Economics, Politics, Diplomacy and Government."
Digital Public Library of America
"The Digital Public Library of America brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. It strives to contain the full breadth of human expression, from the written word, to works of art and culture, to records of America’s heritage, to the efforts and data of science."
HathiTrust Digital Library
"HathiTrust is a partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world."
Open Library
"Open Library is an open, editable library catalog, building towards a web page for every book ever published."
The University of Oxford Text Archive
"The University of Oxford Text Archive develops, collects, catalogues and preserves electronic literary and linguistic resources for use in Higher Education, in research, teaching and learning." Contains digitized copies of classic literature including works of Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Thomas Paine, and others.
Project Gutenberg
Extensive digital library of full-text books, plays, stories, and essays.

Images

Artstor: Images for Academic Publishing
Free images for use in academic publishing, provided by museum collections.
Clker
Free Clip Art that is all in the public domain.
Flickr: Creative Commons
A collection of images published on Flickr using a Creative Commons license.
Getty: Open Content Images
Search over 10,000 images from Getty Museum and Research Institute collections made available for download.
Google Image Search
From your results page, click on "Search tools". Notice the additional search filters that have appeared. By clicking on "Labeled for Reuse" you can filter your image results by license type.
NYPL Digital Gallery
Open access to over 800,000 digital images from the new York Public Library's collections.
Pixabay
High quality images that are royalty free (you'll need to create a free account first)
Smithsonian Open Access
Download images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.
Wellcome Images
Providing access to the visual collections of the Wellcome Library, which documents "2000 years of human culture" with a focus on biomedical imagery. Most images are open access, with others available for paid licensing.
Wikimedia Commons
"A database of freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute"

Video

YouTube
From your results page, click on "Filters". Notice the additional search filters that have appeared. By clicking on "Creative Commons", you can filter your video results to only those with a CC license.
TED Talks
TED Talks are influential videos from expert speakers on education, business, science, tech and creativity.
Vimeo
Enter your search term in the search bar on the top right of any page. From your search results, click the "Show Advanced Filters" button. Select a Creative Commons license under the License drop down menu, and your search results will automatically update.
Internet Archive : Moving Image Archive
Over 1.5 million digitized videos and clips, including cartoons, commercials and classic films, many public domain or available via Creative Commons license.

Music and Audio

Dig CC Mixter
Vast collection of music and sound files that are under the Creative Commons licenses
Freesound
"Freesound aims to create a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps, ... released under Creative Commons licenses that allow their reuse."