The New York Public Library (NYPL) Digital Collections is a vast living database of digitised materials from the NYPL library collections, with new content added every day.

Content spans a wide range of historical eras, geography, and media, and includes drawings, illuminated manuscripts, maps, photographs, posters, prints, rare illustrated books, videos, audio, and more. Encompassing the subject strengths of the vast collections of The Library, these materials represent the applied sciences, fine and decorative arts, history, performing arts, and social sciences.

You can search or browse to find content.  NYPL’s Introduction blogpost is a great way to learn how to navigate your way around the collections effectively.

You can restrict your searching and browsing to Only Public Domain materials, which means you are free to use the content without restriction.  This covers more than 180,000 items! Find out more about how you can download and reuse these public domain materials.  If you wish to use material which is not in the public domain and is subject to copyright (this is clearly flagged on each item) it is your responsibility to determine and satisfy copyright or other use restrictions when publishing or otherwise using the materials.

Here is an example of a public domain item – Pratt’s Typewriter, as depicted on a cigarette card from the Arents Tobacco Collection.

Take a look around the digital collection to see if it holds materials of interest to your research, teaching or studies – or just for a fascinating general insight into historical materials!