The Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ) yesterday announced it now allows the free and unrestricted use of more than 100,000 public-domain historical documents and images, in the public domain, that have been digitized and made available on its website.
”The time has come to adopt open access for as many available resources as possible. BAnQ has chosen to take action in this regard so that users across Quebec and the world be unburdened by unnecessary restrictions,” said Jean-Louis Roy, BAnQ’s chief executive officer.
Although the headline of yesterday’s announcement suggested visitors to the BAnQ website will be able to easily identify right now which documents are in the public domain and which are not, this won’t be possible for a few months. (If it is, I couldn’t figure it out by looking at a number of online images.)
Only this fall will a large collection of images and documents be designated copyright-free on BAnQ’s website, and the project to identify more documents will continue into 2020.
This process will make it possible for website visitors to know the allowed usage of each digitized document.
Select ‘Nos sélections’ for a selection that includes newspapers, maps, postcards, and photos, or click on ‘Tout voir’ to ‘see everything’ in the Quebec Heritage collection.
Once this is done, anyone around the world, without asking permission, will be able to use BAnQ’s copyright-free images in presentations and books and on social media and posters. Even artists will be able to modify images to integrate it into their own creations. People who contribute to Wikipedia and Wikicommons will also be able to upload the public-domain documents.
The historical documents to be identified as being in the public domain or not can be found in the Patrimoine québécois (Quebec Heritage) section on BAnQ numérique (Digital BAnQ).
During the past two decades, BAnQ has digitized several million documents and uploaded them to its website. The archivists, tech team, and other staff members have their work cut out for them.
