Happy belated Public Domain Day! While Public Domain 2024 may be most talked about this year for releasing the original Mickey Mouse, Steamboat Willie, to the public domain there are oodles of works that are transitioning into the public domain due to the expiration of their copyright protection.
Copyright protection for works created in the US currently lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years, but it hasn’t always been this way. Changes in copyright legislation throughout the twentieth century mean that different types of material had different spans of copyright protection. This January, published works in 1928 that had met formalities required by copyright law at the time of publication are freshly falling into the public domain.
For six years now, the USF Libraries have celebrated this transition of copyrighted work by digitizing a selection of material from our collections. After a public vote, we added 23 titles across collections including three growing Digital Collection areas: Florida Studies, Environmental and Natural History, and Sheet Music.
Florida Studies
- Aboriginal wooden objects from southern Florida (with three plates) by Jesse Walter Fewkes
- Survey of Negro colleges and universities : section of Bulletin, 1928, no. 7, chapter XIII, Florida
- Tampa : Florida’s greatest city
- Stories of the Seminoles by Margaret C. Fairlie
- The notorious Ashley gang; a saga of the king and queen of the Everglades by Hix Cook Stuart
Environmental and Natural History
- Beach deposits of ilmenite, zircon and rutile in Florida by James H. C. Martens
- Tropical and sub-tropical fruits, fancy palms, ornamental trees & shrubs
- Tampa and Hillsboro bays, Fla. Letter from the secretary of war transmitting report from the chief of engineers on preliminary examination and survey of Tampa and Hillsboro bays, Fla., and Tampa harbor, Fla. …by the United States. Army. Corps of Engineers
Sheet Music
- My Miami moon by Lou (Louis) Herscher
- This is Florida by Mary W. Drane
- When it’s cocktail time in Cuba by Basil Dillon Woon
- I don’t want to fly : (away from Tampa Bay) by Mary Valdespino
- Miami moon by E. St. Clair Piggott
Included in this year’s digitization is Esther Forbes’ A Mirror for Witches, a novel addressing the witch hunt in seventeenth-century New England that preceded Authur Miller’s more famous Crucible by several decades (Wikipedia).
Also among this year’s digitized items are a selection of titles by the author Betty Van Deventer. Van Deventer published several books through Haldeman-Julius Publishing Company’s Little Blue Book series. The Little Blue Books were intended to provide the working class with low-cost, pocket-sized literature and cultural commentary. Van Deventer is most remembered for the book Confessions of a Gold Digger which is still referred to by scholars studying the gender conflicts of the 1920s (Dijkstra, 1996).
- Confessions of a modern woman : what does she say, think, feel, and do? By Betty Van Deventer
- 100 professions for women by Betty Van Deventer
- How New York working girls live by Betty Van Deventer
- How to get a husband by Betty Van Deventer
- Lives of chorus girls : a realistic picture of an interesting and sometimes romantic profession by Betty Van Deventer
A few additional titles from the Little Blue Book series by a variety of authors join Van Deventer’s in our Digital Collections:
- Are we machines? : Is life mechanical or is it “something else”? by Clarence Darrow
- The case for and against sexual sterilization by Robert C Dexter
- What the woman past forty should know by William J. Fielding
- A series of eleven lessons in karma yoga (the yogi philosophy of thought-use) and the yogin doctrine of work by Bhikshu
Once you are done perusing this year’s contributions to our Digital Collections, don’t forget to explore our previous celebrations:
References
- Dijkstra, B. (1996) Evil Sisters: the threat of female sexuality and the cult of manhood. Alfred A. Knopf; New York.
- A Mirror for Witches. (2023, December 19) Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mirror_for_Witches