Annual Vote for Public Domain Digitization: 2025

Reading Time: < 1 minute It’s that time of the year: Public Domain Digitization! We’ve pulled a list of titles from our collections that will fall into the public domain on January 1, 2025, and now we need your help selecting the 25 items that we will scan to celebrate Public Domain 2025. 

Fair Use Week 2024

Reading Time: 2 minutes Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week, February 26th-March 1st, 2024, is a celebration of this exception in copyright law.  Every year, fairuseweek.org provides a central location where libraries, museums, and related institutions can share the events and programming that they have planned as a celebration of fair use. 

Celebrating the Public Domain through digitization

Reading Time: 3 minutes 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.

Annual Vote to Digitize for the Public Domain

Reading Time: < 1 minute Help us choose the material that will be digitized for January 2024 as part of the Libraries’ annual celebration of the public domain! We have searched our physical collections to find the rarest titles whose copyright will expire in 2024, and now we need your help to figure out which 24 to digitize.  Please vote for your favorites below (choose up to 24)! 

Celebrating the Public Domain through digitization

Reading Time: 3 minutes Join the USF Libraries in our annual celebration of the public domain through digitization! The USF Libraries have selected material from the Libraries’ collections published in 1927 that are newly in the public domain to digitize in celebration. This is the fifth year we have celebrated through digitization! 

Annual Vote for Public Domain Digitization: Tell us what to digitize for our 2023 celebration of the public domain

Reading Time: < 1 minute Every year in January, a new group of material will have their copyrights expire and become part of the public domain, where creative work is free to use by anyone for any purpose. We have poured over the list of items in our collection that will have their copyright expire in 2023, finding the rarest titles we have that fit into our Digital Collections. We need your help to decide which 23 items we should digitize.

Fair Use Week 2022

Reading Time: 2 minutes Fair Use/Fair Dealing week is an international celebration of exceptions in copyright laws that allow for certain uses of copyrighted material in order to encourage new art and creativity.  Fair use week runs from February 21–25, 2022 and was originally supported by the Association of Research Libraries.

Digitization and Strange Stipulations in Donation Agreements

Reading Time: 3 minutes A donation agreement can smooth the way for future digitization of a collection or hinder future uses of collection material. With all of the variables possible in donation agreements, it shouldn’t be surprising that some donor stipulations on older collections can take an archive or special collections by surprise.

Vote for Your Favorites to be Included in our 2022 Celebration of the Public Domain

Reading Time: < 1 minute Every year in January, the copyright protection of a new group of material will expire and those items will become part of the public domain. In celebration, the USF Libraries select titles from our physical collections to digitize. This year we intend to digitize 22 items.  We have narrowed the possible titles down to 50 and need your help to decide which will be highlighted by our public domain celebration.  Vote for your favorites by July 21st!