Public Work: A Fast Search Engine for Public Domain Images
Public Work is 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. On the downside, their sourcing and attribution isn’t great — especially when compared to something like Flickr Commons.
I’d love it if an interface this quick and visual-first were adopted by museums though — let’s face it: the image search on museum, library, and institution websites is often terrible and slow. (via @jaygogh)
Discussion 6 comments
Does anyone know... are there museums out there that are getting this "right"?
It's an interesting concept; frustrating to find that it's not a very robust search function, though. I tried searching for "North Carolina" and was served images of Georgia and buildings from New York. If they are able to improve the search accuracy, I could see this being useful!
They have a few other approaches to the public domain dataset on the website.
A standard search interface, and another approach to the visual interface with different UI. Even a github repo to build your own tools around their data.
I think what you're looking for is https://artvee.com, which while not perfect is pretty darn good.
Jessamyn West has a great dive into this site that adds some additional context. Which I appreciate.
https://www.librarian.net/stax/5566/the-mining-of-the-public-domain/
I like https://museo.app/ "Museo is a visual search engine that connects you with the Art Institute of Chicago, the Rijksmuseum, the Harvard Art Museums, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the The Cleveland Museum of Art, and the New York Public Library Digital Collectionmore to come!"
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