Library Guides: Digital Scholarship: Gathering Media

Finding Media

When working on digital scholarship or digital projects, you may need to gather media, such as audio clips, photos, video, or music. Because your work is being published on the internet, it is important that any media that you use respect copyright law. Below are resources for finding Public Domain or Open Access media.

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. (1898 - 1931). Mt. Tacoma, Tacoma, Wash. Retrieved from http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47d9-a238-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

Internet Archive
Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.
Smithsonian Open Access
Smithsonian Open Access, where you can download, share, and reuse millions of the Smithsonian’s images—right now, without asking. With new platforms and tools, you have easier access to more than 4.5 million 2D and 3D digital items from our collections—with many more to come. This includes images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 21 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.

Music + Audio

BBC Sound Effects
These 16,000 BBC Sound Effects are made available by the BBC in WAV format to download for use under the terms of the RemArc Licence. The Sound Effects are BBC copyright, but they may be used for personal, educational or research purposes, as detailed in the license.
cchound
cchound.com is a curated library of free music for content creators. We focus on (until algorithms can do it better than Martin) carefully handpicking every resource that is published.
dig.ccMixter
Instrumental music for film, video, video games, and more. Can search via tags. Music all Creative Commons licensed and may require attribution.
FreeMusicArchive
Free Music Archive and Tribe of Noise are known for free to download music licensed under Creative Commons.
Library of Congress Audio Recordings
Historic music, interviews, speeches, and more audio files available through the Library of Congress.
YouTube Audio Library
You can use the YouTube Audio Library to get free music and sound effects to use in your videos. Icons for sounds/music licensed under Creative Commons that require attribution.

Photo + Video

Flickr Commons
The key goal of The Commons is to share hidden treasures from the world's public photography archives. Includes photo albums from international museums and archives.
Pexels
Free stock photos and video. Recommended citations and clear Creative Commons licenses displayed.
Public Domain Review
The Public Domain Review is dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas – focusing on works now fallen into the public domain, the vast commons of out-of-copyright material that everyone is free to enjoy, share, and build upon without restrictions.
Wikimedia Commons
Wikimedia Commons is a collection of freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute.