Saturday Sharing (My Finds Are Yours)

This week's edition of Saturday Sharing is all about expanding your knowledge, especially through online public domain sites.

✦ Ever wonder how the Web evolved? Find out via this interactive timeline, "The Evolution of the Web". (My thanks to the Smithsonian's The Bigger Picture blog, which recently included the link in a weekly round-up.)

✦ Did you know you can use ketchup to remove tarnish from brass and copper cookware? I didn't either, until I clicked over from a Patti Digh post to Real Simple Solutions to cleaning without chemicals. (My thanks to Patti Digh for discovering and sharing this wonderful find.)

✦ Wordsmiths of all kinds will be able to put to use this free clearinghouse of homophones — words that sound alike but have different spellings and meanings — maintained by computer scientist Al Aloisi. It's fun just to browse the word lists on the site.

✦ Looking for information that's free to view, download, and reuse without restriction? Check out The Public Domain Review, a wonderful resource. With a self-described aspiration "to become a bounteous gateway into the whopping plenitude that is the public domain," TPDR offers articles and public domain films (including clips, shorts, full-length silent films, and full-length talkies), audio, images, and texts. There's also a Resources section that lists other places to find public domain works on the Web. Materials are added to the site weekly.

Jonathan Gray and Adam Green created and edit the review, which they launched on the first day of January 2011 to coincide with international Public Domain Day. Their review is a project of the Open Knowledge Foundation. Gray's own site, by the way, is worth visiting.

The Public Domain Review on FaceBook and Twitter

✦ At Open Shakespeare, billed as "the marriage of text and technology", you'll find a lot about Shakespeare that's in the public domain. It's all free to use, reuse, and redistribute. Also a project of Open Knowledge Foundation, this site offers essays (literary criticism), a facility to compare editions and translations of Shakespeare's work, a function to search the plays and poems, texts of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and other plays of Shakespeare, and statistics for texts and words.  Keep up to date with additions to the site through the News section.

Other OKF projects of interest: Open Text Book,  Public Domain Works, and Weaving History.

OKF on FaceBook and Twitter

OKF Blog

✦ The New York Public Library is one of our greatest resources. Its Digital Gallery is a free and open treasure chest of more than 700,000 images digitized from the NYPL's collections. You'll find there illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints, photographs, and much more. View all the Collection Guides to learn what's available in these subject areas: arts and literature, cities and buildings, culture and society, history and geography, industry and technology, nature and science, and printing and graphics. Be sure to read the Library's Terms and Conditions to enjoy your finds to the fullest.

✦ The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) aims to give you free "global access to knowledge about life on Earth". Using collaborative technology to promote knowledge of and understanding about our planet's 1.9 million known species, the EOL portal currently boasts more than 750,000 pages, more than 630,000 images, and 180 content partners.

EOL on FaceBook, Twitter, and Flickr

EOL Blog