The USF Libraries celebrates its seventh year digitizing material from our collections in order to celebrate the public domain and Public Domain Day! U.S. Copyright Law protects works of original authorship for a limited period of time. At the end of this protection, those works fall into the public domain for anyone to use for any reason, re-envisioning works for new purposes and audiences.
It can sometimes seem difficult to figure out whether a specific work is in the public domain because U.S. Copyright Law has changed over the last century. The Digital Dialogs post “Finding the Public Domain” reviews tools and techniques for discovering whether and when a work is in the public domain.
The Public Domain Review wound up last year with an advent calendar that spotlighted different materials that would be public domain in 2025, including Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and works by Duke Ellington. At USF, we celebrate by selecting materials from our collections that will be public domain and can be digitized freely. In spring of 2024, the USF Libraries had its “Annual Vote for Public Domain Digitization” and selected 25 titles to digitize in celebration of the public domain.
Children’s Literature
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Cover from Tampa Latina, “Tampa Latina : numero dedicado a la fundación de Ybor y a las sociedades Latinas.” (1929). Select Florida Studies Publications. 32. - Stories of Robin Hood told to the children by Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
- The Pirate of the Gulf by Rupert Sargent Holland
- The Big budget for girls.
- Tom Swift and his house on wheels, or, A trip to the mountain of mystery by Victor Appleton
- Pirates of the Air by Eustace L. Adams
Florida Studies
- Gandy Bridge, connecting Tampa and St. Petersburg, Fla. ; map of main highways of the Florida peninsula by Tampa & St. Petersburg Bridge Co.
- Songs from the Florida Everglades, and other poems by Ruby Pearl Patterson.
- Tampa Latina : numero dedicado a la fundación de Ybor y a las sociedades Latinas.
- The Japanese persimmon in Florida by Arthur Forest Camp
- The proposed national park in southern Everglades of Florida by David Fairchild
- What price paradise? By Alan Hillgarth
- The extinct land mammals of Florida by George Gaylor Simpson
Sheet Music
- The original boogie woogie : piano solo by Pine Top Smith
- Mah little tater blossom: Southern dialect song by Alice Mayfield
This year, like last, we are also adding a selection of Little Blue Books and works of social commentary from 1928 to our Select Rare Books and Publications digital collection.
- Smuggling days and smuggling ways by Henry N. Shore
- How to psycho-analyze your neighbors by Clement Wood
- How to acquire good taste : what is culture? By Isaac Goldberg
- Racial intermarriage in the United States : one of the most interesting phenomena in our national life by George S. Shuyler
- Between sunset & dawn Lionel Jack Ernest Birch
- Why wives leave home by Betty Van Deventer
- History, truth or propaganda? By Harry Elmer, Barnes
- Are we civilized? Human cultures in perspective by Robert Harry Lowie
- Life and labor in the old South by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
- Is our civilization over-sexed? : Freud has lifted a great incubus of shame from man by Samuel Daniel House
- How to be a gate-crasher by Samuel Marx