Explore the Newly-Launched Public Domain Image Archive with 10,000+ Free Historical Images

in Archives, History | January 9th, 2025

We’ve often fea­tured the work of the Pub­lic Domain Review here on Open Cul­ture, and also var­i­ous search­able copy­right-free image data­bas­es that have arisen over the years. It makes sense that those two worlds would col­lide, and now they’ve done so in the form of the just-launched Pub­lic Domain Image Archive (PDIA). The Pub­lic Domain Review invites us to use the site to “explore our hand-picked col­lec­tion of 10,046 out-of-copy­right works, free for all to browse, down­load, and reuse” — and note that the num­ber will grow, giv­en that “this is a liv­ing data­base with new images added every week.”

As with any por­tal of this kind, you can browse by cat­e­go­ry tags, the selec­tion of which includes every­thing from archi­tec­ture to dec­o­ra­tions to occultism to war. But if you’d like to get a sense of the sheer for­mal, aes­thet­ic, cul­tur­al, and his­tor­i­cal vari­ety of the PDIA, you might con­sid­er tak­ing a first look through its “infi­nite view,” which allows you to scroll in all direc­tions through a lim­it­less labyrinth of copy­right-free won­ders: adver­tise­ments, Bib­li­cal scenes, old-time sports­men, out­er-space pho­tos, mush­rooms, medieval musi­cal crea­tures, let­ter­forms, and, well, labyrinths.

You might also rec­og­nize items you’ve seen here on Open Cul­ture before, like the nature draw­ings of Ernst Haeck­el, the mod­ern art-lam­poon­ing chil­dren’s book The Cubies’ ABC, or the ghosts and mon­sters illus­trat­ed by ukiyo‑e mas­ter Hoku­sai. The PDIA pro­vides more con­text than some pub­lic-domain image archives, even link­ing to rel­e­vant Pub­lic Domain Review posts, where you can read about such top­ics as Emi­ly Noyes Vanderpoel’s col­or analy­sis charts (which also inspired a post of ours), the end of books (as pre­dict­ed in 1894), and even “Cats and Cap­tions before the Inter­net Age.” Hav­ing fall­en into the pub­lic domain, all this mate­r­i­al is, of course, avail­able to use for any pur­pose you like — includ­ing just sat­is­fy­ing your own curios­i­ty.

Relat­ed com­ments:

The New York Pub­lic Library Presents an Archive of 860,000 His­tor­i­cal Images: Down­load Medieval Man­u­scripts, Japan­ese Prints, William Blake Illus­tra­tions & More

A Search Engine for Find­ing Free, Pub­lic Domain Images from World-Class Muse­ums

The British Library Puts Over 1,000,000 Images in the Pub­lic Domain: A Deep­er Dive Into the Col­lec­tion

Public.Work: A Smooth­ly Search­able Archive of 100,000+ “Copy­right-Free” Images

Sea-Ser­pents, Vam­pires, Pirates & More: The Pub­lic Domain Review’s Sec­ond Book of Essays

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Explore and Download 14,000+ Woodcuts from Antwerp’s Plantin-Moretus Museum Online Archive

in Archives, Books, Design, History, Museums | November 27th, 2024

We appre­ci­ate illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­scripts and his­tor­i­cal books here on Open Cul­ture, adhere though we do to a much more restrained aes­thet­ic style in our own texts. But that’s not to deny the temp­ta­tion to start this para­graph with one of those over­sized ini­tial let­ters that grew ever larg­er and more elab­o­rate over cen­turies past. The online archive of Antwer­p’s Plan­tin-More­tus Muse­um offers plen­ty of wood­cut Ws to choose from, includ­ing designs sober and bare­ly leg­i­ble, as well as Ws that incor­po­rate a sprout­ing plant, some kind of saint, and even a scene of what looks like impend­ing mur­der.

If you’re not in the mar­ket for fan­cy let­ters, you can also browse the Plan­tin-More­tus wood­cut archive through the cat­e­gories of plants, ani­mals, and sci­ences. Some of these illus­tra­tions are tech­ni­cal, and oth­ers more fan­ci­ful; in cer­tain cas­es, the cen­turies have prob­a­bly ren­dered them less real­is­tic-look­ing than once they were.

Not all the more than 14,000 wood­cuts now in the archive would seem to fit neat­ly in one of those cat­e­gories, but if you take a look at par­tic­u­lar entries, you’ll find that the muse­um has also labeled them with more spe­cif­ic tags, like “clas­si­cal antiq­ui­ty,” “map/landscape,” or “aure­ole” (the bright medieval-look­ing halo that marks a fig­ure as holy).

All these wood­cuts, in any case, have been made free to down­load (just click the cloud icon in the upper-right of the win­dow that opens after you click on the image itself) and use as you please. Back in the six­teenth cen­tu­ry, Christophe Plan­tin and Jan More­tus, for whom the Plan­tin-More­tus Muse­um was named, were well-placed to col­lect such things. The Plan­tin-More­tus Muse­um’s web­site describes them as “a rev­o­lu­tion­ary duo.

They were the first print­ers on an indus­tri­al scale — the Steve Jobs and Mark Zucker­berg of their day.” And if these decon­tex­tu­al­ized arti­facts of the print rev­o­lu­tion strike us as a bit strange to us today, just imag­ine how our sur­viv­ing inter­net memes will look four cen­turies hence. Enter the wood­block col­lec­tion here.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed con­tent:

Down­load 215,000 Japan­ese Wood­block Prints by Mas­ters Span­ning the Tradition’s 350-Year His­to­ry

800 Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Are Now Online: Browse & Down­load Them Cour­tesy of the British Library and Bib­lio­thèque Nationale de France

Stephen Fry Takes Us Inside the Sto­ry of Johannes Guten­berg & the First Print­ing Press

Behold the Beau­ti­ful Pages from a Medieval Monk’s Sketch­book: A Win­dow Into How Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­scripts Were Made (1494)

Clas­sic Films and Film­mak­ers, Ren­dered in Wood­cut By a Los Ange­les Artist-Cinephile

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Download 1,600+ Publications from the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Books, Guides, Magazines & More

in Archives, Museums | November 5th, 2024

Many of us in these past few gen­er­a­tions first heard of the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art while read­ing E. L. Konigs­burg’s nov­el From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweil­er. More than a few of us also fan­ta­sized about run­ning away to live in that vast cul­tur­al insti­tu­tion like the book’s young pro­tag­o­nists Clau­dia and Jamie Kin­caid. Yet among oth­er, more prac­ti­cal con­cerns, we might have won­dered where we were going to secure enough read­ing mate­r­i­al to get us through those long after-hours nights. Konigs­burg had Clau­dia and Jamie vis­it the for­mer Don­nell Library Cen­ter, but what about in the Met itself?

What we prob­a­bly did­n’t real­ize in our youth was that, in addi­tion to being a muse­um, the Met is a pub­lish­er. Now, at the Met­Pub­li­ca­tions dig­i­tal archive, we can read a great vari­ety of the books, guides, and peri­od­i­cals it’s put out for more than a century–from a 1911 cat­a­log of the muse­um’s col­lec­tion of pot­tery, porce­lain, and faïence (which refers to pot­tery of the tin-glazed vari­ety) to — as of this writ­ing — the lat­est issue of the Met’s Bul­letin, on Mex­i­can print­mak­ers includ­ing Diego Rivera and José Clemente Oroz­co. They and the more than 1,600 pub­li­ca­tions that lie between them are free for you to explore, some read­able online, and some down­load­able in PDF form.

You might find issues of the Bul­letin on every­thing from Frank Lloyd Wright to inter­war pho­tog­ra­phy to Kore­an art, as well as cat­a­logs for exhi­bi­tions like Anglo­Ma­nia: Tra­di­tion and Trans­gres­sion in British Fash­ion, The Art of Illu­mi­na­tion: The Lim­bourg Broth­ers and the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry (whose cen­tral work of cal­en­dri­cal art was pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture), Van Gogh in Arles, The Milk­maid by Johannes Ver­meer, and The Poet­ry of Nature: Edo Paint­ings from the Fish­bein-Ben­der Col­lec­tion. Met­Pub­li­ca­tions offers plen­ty of inter­est­ing read­ing, but if you find you sud­den­ly have to do some seri­ous art-his­tor­i­cal research, you’ll also find that it’s a far more con­ve­nient resource than Clau­dia and Jamie had.

Enter the Met­Pub­li­ca­tions dig­i­tal archive here, and, once there, par­tic­u­lar­ly explore the “Free to Down­load” sec­tion.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art Puts 490,000 High-Res Images Online & Makes Them Free to Use

Take a New Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Tour of the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art

An Unbe­liev­ably Detailed, Hand-Drawn Map Lets You Explore the Rich Col­lec­tions of the Met Muse­um

A World of Art: The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Free: Download Over 33,000 Sounds from the BBC Sound Effects Archive

in Archives | September 30th, 2024

There may be a few young peo­ple in Britain today who rec­og­nize the name Lud­wig Koch, but in the nine­teen-for­ties, he con­sti­tut­ed some­thing of a cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non unto him­self. He “start­ed record­ing sounds and voic­es in the 1880s when he was still a child” in his native Ger­many, says the web­site of the BBC. After flee­ing from the Nazis, he set­tled in Eng­land, which cre­at­ed the oppor­tu­ni­ty for the Beeb to acquire his col­lec­tion of field record­ings, using it to start build­ing its own library of nature sounds. Soon, Koch “became a house­hold name as a nature broad­cast­er,” and his “dis­tinct Ger­man accent and eccen­tric loca­tion record­ings became so well known that he was par­o­died by Peter Sell­ers.”

You can hear 168 of Koch’s field record­ings at the online archive of BBC Sound Effects, whose dig­i­tal hold­ings have in recent years grown to include over 33,000 dif­fer­ent sounds from var­i­ous sources, span­ning more than a cen­tu­ry.

“These include clips made by the BBC Radio­phon­ic work­shop, record­ings from the Blitz in Lon­don, spe­cial effects made for BBC TV and Radio pro­duc­tions, as well as 15,000 record­ings from the Nat­ur­al His­to­ry Unit archive,” says its About page. “You can explore sounds from every con­ti­nent — from the col­lege bells ring­ing in Oxford to a Patag­on­ian water­fall — or lis­ten to a sub­ma­rine klax­on or the sound of a 1969 Ford Corti­na door slam­ming shut.”

The BBC has made all these record­ings free for your own non-com­mer­cial use, as long as you cred­it where they came from. To put them into a com­mer­cial project, you can license them by click­ing “Show details,” and then the “Buy sound” but­ton that appears right below. The archive also offers a “mix­er mode,” which lets you “lay­er, edit and re-order clips from the archive to cre­ate your own sounds,” poten­tial­ly mash­ing up a wide vari­ety of times and places into a sin­gle sound­scape. A chac­ma baboon wield­ing a laser in a Bel­gian café, for instance, or a laugh­ing woman brew­ing a ket­tle of water at a bull­fight in Spain: hard­ly the sort of aur­al scenes that would be intro­duced by Lud­wig Koch, grant­ed, but here in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, the only lim­it is your imag­i­na­tion. Enter the BBC Sound Effects Archive here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

NASA Puts Online a Big Col­lec­tion of Space Sounds, and They’re Free to Down­load and Use

How the Sound Effects on 1930s Radio Shows Were Made: An Inside Look

Down­load 1,000+ Dig­i­tized Tapes of Sounds from Clas­sic Hol­ly­wood Films & TV, Cour­tesy of the Inter­net Archive

How the Sounds You Hear in Movies Are Real­ly Made: Dis­cov­er the Mag­ic of “Foley Artists”

Michael Winslow, the “Man of 10,000 Sound Effects”, Imper­son­ates the Sounds of Jimi Hendrix’s and Led Zeppelin’s Elec­tric Gui­tars with His Voice

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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A Digital Archive Features Hundreds of Audio Cassette Tape Designs, from the 1960s to the 1990s

in Archives, History, Music, Technology | September 4th, 2024

Audio cas­sette tapes first appeared on the mar­ket in the ear­ly nine­teen-six­ties, but it would take about a decade before they came to dom­i­nate it. And when they did, they’d changed the lives of many a music-lover by hav­ing made it pos­si­ble not just to lis­ten to their albums of choice on the go, but also to col­lect and trade their own cus­tom-assem­bled lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ences. By the eight­ies, blank tapes had become a house­hold neces­si­ty on the order of bat­ter­ies or toi­let paper for such con­sumers — and just as with those fre­quent­ly replen­ished prod­ucts, every­one seemed to have their favorite brand.


Some pre­ferred tapes from Philips, which devel­oped the for­mat of the Com­pact Cas­sette in the first place. Oth­ers had their pick from Fuji, BASF, Sony, Radio Shack, Scotch (which also made tape of the sticky vari­ety), and a host of oth­er brands besides.

Even some mem­bers of post-cas­sette gen­er­a­tions rec­og­nize the old tagline “Is it live or is it Mem­o­rex?” or Max­el­l’s “Blown Away Guy” in his scarf and LC2. If you’re old enough to have done tap­ing of your own, you don’t need a logo to rec­og­nize your brand; you’ll know it as soon as you spot the design of the cas­sette itself in the online archive at tapedeck.org.


“I built tapedeck.org to show­case the amaz­ing beau­ty and (some­times) weird­ness found in the designs of the com­mon audio tape cas­sette,” writes the site’s cre­ator Oliv­er Gel­brich. “There’s an amaz­ing range of designs, start­ing from the ear­ly 60’s func­tion­al cas­sette designs, mov­ing through the col­or­ful play­ful­ness of the 70’s audio tapes to amaz­ing shape vari­a­tions dur­ing the 80s and 90s.” You can browse the ever-expand­ing col­lec­tion by brand, run­ning time, col­or, and even tape coat­ing: chrome, fer­ro, fer­rochrome, and met­al, by whose dif­fer­ences audio­philes set great store.


Some­what improb­a­bly, in this age where even home CD-burn­ing has been dis­placed by near-instan­ta­neous stream­ing and down­load­ing of dig­i­tal music, the cas­sette tape has made some­thing of a come­back. The near-mytho­log­i­cal allure of the mix­tape has only grown in recent years, dur­ing which artists both minor and major have put out cas­sette releas­es — and in some cas­es, cas­sette-only releas­es. This seems to be hap­pen­ing around the world: a few weeks ago, while strolling an art-school neigh­bor­hood in Seoul, where I live, I passed a cof­fee shop that offered its young cus­tomers rentals of both tapes and Walk­man-style play­ers on which to lis­ten to them. As anoth­er gen­er­a­tion-tran­scend­ing slo­gan has it, every­thing old is new again.

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed con­tent:

Home Tap­ing Is Killing Music: When the Music Indus­try Waged War on the Cas­sette Tape Dur­ing the 1980s, and Punk Bands Fought Back

Lis­ten to Audio Arts: The 1970s Tape Cas­sette Arts Mag­a­zine Fea­tur­ing Andy Warhol, Mar­cel Duchamp & Many Oth­ers

The Beau­ty of Degrad­ed Art: Why We Like Scratchy Vinyl, Grainy Film, Wob­bly VHS & Oth­er Ana­log-Media Imper­fec­tion

Atten­tion K‑Mart Shop­pers: Hear 90 Hours of Back­ground Music & Ads from the Retail Giant’s 1980s and 90s Hey­day

A Free Dig­i­tal Archive of Graph­ic Design: A Curat­ed Col­lec­tion of Design Trea­sures from the Inter­net Archive

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Download 1,000+ Digitized Tapes of Sounds from Classic Hollywood Films & TV, Courtesy of the Internet Archive

in Archives, Film, Television | September 2nd, 2024

Watch enough clas­sic movies — espe­cial­ly clas­sic movies from slight­ly down­mar­ket stu­dios — and you’ll swear you’ve been hear­ing the very same sound effects over and over again. That’s because you have been hear­ing the very same sound effects over and over again: once record­ed or acquired for one film, they could, of course, be re-used in anoth­er, and anoth­er, and anoth­er. No such fre­quent­ly employed record­ing has a more illus­tri­ous and well-doc­u­ment­ed his­to­ry than the so-called “Wil­helm scream,” which, accord­ing to Oliv­er Macaulay at the Sci­ence + Media Muse­um, “has been used in over 400 films and TV pro­grams.”

“First record­ed in 1951, the ‘Wil­helm scream’ was ini­tial­ly fea­tured as stock sound effect in Raoul Walsh’s west­ern Dis­tant Drums,” writes Macaulay, but it got its name from a scene in The Charge at Feath­er Riv­er, from 1953: “When Pri­vate Wil­helm takes an arrow to the leg, he lets out the fabled blood-cur­dling cry which came to per­me­ate Hollywood’s sound­scape.”

It may well have been most wide­ly heard in the orig­i­nal Star Wars, “when Luke Sky­walk­er shoots a stormtroop­er off a ledge,” but for decades it was pulled from the vault when­ev­er “char­ac­ters meet a grim and gris­ly end, from being shot to falling off a build­ing to being caught up in an explo­sion.”

Orig­i­nal­ly labeled “Man eat­en by an alli­ga­tor; screams” (for such was the fate of the char­ac­ter in Dis­tant Drums), the orig­i­nal record­ing ses­sion of this much-dis­cussed sound effect is now down­load­able from the USC Opti­cal Sound Effects Library at the Inter­net Archive. It con­tains three col­lec­tions: the Gold and Red Libraries, which “con­sist of high-qual­i­ty, first gen­er­a­tion copies of orig­i­nal nitrate opti­cal sound effects from the 1930s & 40s cre­at­ed for Hol­ly­wood stu­dios,” and the Sun­set Edi­to­r­i­al (SSE) Library, which “includes clas­sic effects from the 1930s into the ’80s” by the epony­mous out­fit. At a Freesound Blog post about the archiv­ing and preser­va­tion of the SSE Library, audio engi­neer Craig Smith notes that the com­pa­ny “main­ly did episod­ic tele­vi­sion shows like Bewitched, I Dream of Jean­nie, The Par­tridge Fam­i­ly, and The Wal­tons.”

Lis­ten­ing through the USC Opti­cal Sound Effects Library will thus prove a res­o­nant expe­ri­ence, as it were, with fans of mid-cen­tu­ry Hol­ly­wood movies and tele­vi­sion alike. It may also inspire an appre­ci­a­tion for the sheer amount of record­ing, index­ing, edit­ing, and mix­ing work that must have gone into even out­ward­ly sim­ple pro­duc­tions, which nev­er­the­less required the sounds of doors, birds, sirens, guns, and falling bod­ies — as well as the voic­es of men, women, chil­dren — to fill out a plau­si­ble audio­vi­su­al atmos­phere. They also reveal, as Smith puts it, “the shared cul­ture of Hol­ly­wood’s take on what things ‘sound­ed like.’ ” Heard in iso­la­tion, some of these may seem no more real­is­tic than the Wil­helm scream, but that was­n’t quite the point; they just had to sound like things do in movies and on TV.

via Mefi

Relat­ed con­tent:

How the Sounds You Hear in Movies Are Real­ly Made: Dis­cov­er the Mag­ic of “Foley Artists”

How Sounds Are Faked For Nature Doc­u­men­taries: Meet the Artists Who Cre­ate the Sounds of Fish, Spi­ders, Orang­utans, Mush­rooms & More

Down­load an Archive of 16,000 Sound Effects from the BBC: A Fas­ci­nat­ing His­to­ry of the 20th Cen­tu­ry in Sound

The Sounds of Blade Run­ner: How Music & Sound Effects Became Part of the DNA of Rid­ley Scott’s Futur­is­tic World

The Wil­helm Scream is Back

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Browse 64 Years of RadioShack Catalogs Free Online … and Revisit the History of American Consumer Electronics

in Archives, History, Technology | August 30th, 2024

“I bet RadioShack was great once,” writes for­mer employ­ee Jon Bois in a much-cir­cu­lat­ed 2014 piece for SB Nation. “I can’t look through their decades-old cat­a­logs and come away with any oth­er impres­sion. They sold giant wal­nut-wood speak­ers I’d kill to have today. They sold com­put­ers back when peo­ple were try­ing to under­stand what they were. When I was a lit­tle kid, going to RadioShack was bet­ter than going to the toy store. It was the toy store for tall peo­ple.” Yet by the mid-twen­ty-tens, it had become a “pan­icked and half-dead retail empire”; in 2015, it final­ly filed for bank­rupt­cy.

Still, all those cat­a­logs live on, free to browse in the dig­i­tal archive at Radioshackcatalogs.com. The first vol­ume dates from 1939, by which time Radio Shack (as its name was orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten) had already been in busi­ness for sev­en­teen years. “This cat­a­log is intend­ed to serve as a com­pre­hen­sive and accu­rate list­ing of what we believe to be the essen­tial and unusu­al require­ments of the radio ama­teur, the ser­vice­man, lab­o­ra­to­ries, indus­tries, and schools,” declares its open­ing let­ter to the cus­tomer. “To boast of our ser­vice in any respect would be so much use­less ver­biage, ser­vice hav­ing been the fea­ture of our growth.”

Nei­ther ser­vice nor growth remained fea­tures of the com­pa­ny by the time Bois was work­ing there. But it had been a pret­ty glo­ri­ous run: to behold the first 50 years of RadioShack cat­a­logs is to behold noth­ing less than the evo­lu­tion of Amer­i­can con­sumer elec­tron­ics. At first direct­ed toward those with seri­ous tech­ni­cal know-how, the com­pa­ny’s offer­ings expand­ed over the decades to appeal to hob­by­ists, then to ordi­nary peo­ple look­ing to intro­duce a bit of elec­tron­ic — and lat­er, dig­i­tal — enrich­ment into their pro­fes­sion­al and per­son­al lives.

Some Amer­i­cans found their way to RadioShack by build­ing crys­tal radios and sci­ence-fair projects in child­hood; oth­ers began fre­quent­ing its stores while build­ing their first real hi-fi sys­tem, com­po­nent by com­po­nent; oth­ers still got into per­son­al com­put­ing through the store-brand TRS-80 (or “Trash 80,” as more seri­ous com­put­er nerds called it). My own grand­fa­ther was such a habitué that, when he died ear­ly in the nineties, our house sud­den­ly filled up with inher­it­ed RadioShack-only prod­ucts, from Real­is­tic radios to Tandy com­put­ers. (I remem­ber spend­ing many hap­py hours with the Mod­el 100, a prim­i­tive lap­top grand­ly mar­ket­ed as a “Micro Exec­u­tive Work Sta­tion.”)

“This is a con­sumer tech­nol­o­gy busi­ness that is built to work per­fect­ly in the year 1975,” writes Bois. And indeed, the 1975 RadioShack cat­a­log offers page after won­drous page of remote-con­trolled stere­os (“the ulti­mate in lux­u­ry”) and “action radios”; fiber-optic dec­o­ra­tive light­ing fix­tures, eight-track car tape decks; cal­cu­la­tors promis­ing a “pock­et­ful of mir­a­cles”; and built-it-your­self inter­coms, pock­et lie detec­tors, and “col­or organs.” Alas, like so many com­mer­cial enter­pris­es that rode high in the mid-twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry, RadioShack failed to take advan­tage of the inter­net, and was ulti­mate­ly crushed by it — an iron­ic fate indeed for what had so long been the one-stop tech­nol­o­gy shop. Enter the archive of RadioShack cat­a­logs here.

via MetaFil­ter

Relat­ed con­tent:

IKEA Dig­i­tizes & Puts Online 70 Years of Its Cat­a­logs: Explore the Designs of the Swedish Fur­ni­ture Giant

A New Online Archive Lets You Read the Whole Earth Cat­a­log and Oth­er Whole Earth Pub­li­ca­tions, Tak­ing You from 1970 to 2002

Watch “Hi-Fi-Fo-Fum,” a Short Satir­i­cal Film About the Inven­tion of the Audio­phile (1959)

Nir­vana Plays in a Radio Shack, the Day After Record­ing its First Demo Tape (1988)

The First Cell­phone: Dis­cov­er Motorola’s DynaT­AC 8000X, a 2‑Pound Brick Priced at $3,995 (1984)

One Man’s Quest to Build the Best Stereo Sys­tem in the World

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Public.Work: A Smoothly Searchable Archive of 100,000+ “Copyright-Free” Images

in Archives, Art | August 12th, 2024

We live in an age, we’re often told, when our abil­i­ty to con­jure up an image is lim­it­ed only by our imag­i­na­tion. These days, this notion tends to refer to arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence-pow­ered sys­tems that gen­er­ate visu­al mate­r­i­al from text prompts, like DALL‑E and the many oth­ers that have pro­lif­er­at­ed in its wake. But how­ev­er tech­no­log­i­cal­ly impres­sive they are, they also reveal that our imag­i­na­tion has its lim­its, giv­ing form only to what we can put into words. To be inspired prop­er­ly again, we must explore far­ther afield, in the visu­al realms of oth­er times and places, which we can eas­i­ly do on a site like Public.work.

Jason Kot­tke describes Public.work as “an image search engine that boasts 100,000 ‘copy­right-free’ images from insti­tu­tions like the NYPL, the Met, etc. It’s fast with a rel­a­tive­ly sim­ple inter­face and uses AI to auto-cat­e­go­rize and sug­gest pos­si­bly relat­ed images (both visu­al­ly and con­tent-wise). And it’s fun to just visu­al­ly click around on relat­ed images.”

These jour­neys can take you from vin­tage mag­a­zine cov­ers to for­eign chil­dren’s books, life­like for­eign land­scapes to elab­o­rate world maps, Japan­ese wood­block prints to road­side Amer­i­cana — or such has been my expe­ri­ence, at any rate.

“On the down­side,” Kot­tke adds, “their sourc­ing and attri­bu­tion isn’t great — espe­cial­ly when com­pared to some­thing like Flickr Com­mons.” Accord­ing to librar­i­an Jes­samyn West, Public.work isn’t exact­ly a search engine, but an inter­face for a site called Cos­mos, which describes itself as “a Pin­ter­est alter­na­tive for cre­atives” meant to cre­ate “a more mind­ful inter­net.”

Get­ting the full sto­ry behind any par­tic­u­lar images you find there will require you to put a bit of ener­gy into research, or at least to locate the fruits of research done else­where on the inter­net. As for what you do with them, that will, of course, depend on your own cre­ative instincts. Enter Public.work here.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed con­tent:

Cre­ative Com­mons Offi­cial­ly Launch­es a Search Engine That Index­es 300+ Mil­lion Pub­lic Domain Images

A Search Engine for Find­ing Free, Pub­lic Domain Images from World-Class Muse­ums

The Smith­son­ian Puts 4.5 Mil­lion High-Res Images Online and Into the Pub­lic Domain, Mak­ing Them Free to Use

Down­load for Free 2.6 Mil­lion Images from Books Pub­lished Over Last 500 Years on Flickr

The British Library Puts 1,000,000 Images into the Pub­lic Domain, Mak­ing Them Free to Reuse & Remix

Free: Down­load 5.3 Mil­lion Images from Books Pub­lished Over Last 500 Years

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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