The Art Institute of Chicago now has 44,000 items from its collection downloadable as pictures under a CC0 licence. I did a test search for cat. What struck me first was the rich range.

My excitement was dampened when I realised that most of these results had no hi-res download. What I should have done was spotted the easy-to-miss faded “filters” button, up top, which when clicked pops out a sidebar. In the sidebar you can tick to filter by “Public domain”, which gives you the results with the downloadable images.

The filtered results are still fairly impressive, but of course lack the nicer “wow” illustrations made after about the 1910s. Some images download without file extensions, possibly because they already have a . in their title (e.g. “Honorable Mr. Cat”)…

Some of the search substitutions are rather dumb, for instance if you search for plague you get plaque.

The pictures seem to mostly be around 2,000 to 3,000px and 96dpi. There’s no sign-up needed, and access is free and public.

NAVER Academic is an attempt at a Google Scholar-alike for South Koreans. It’s fast and neatly designed, and is interesting because (unlike Scholar) it has a “Free” filter for its search results.

My quick test search suggests it’s mainly interesting for those seeking non-English content from the region. A search for mongolian folk song filtered by “free” had 19 results. Six of these had English titles and were checked…

1. English abstract. No full-text.
2. English abstract. No full-text.
3. Very short English abstract. CORE record. No full-text.
4. Short English abstract. CORE/JSTOR record. No full-text, DOI link led to 20 Euro paywall.
5. Very short English abstract. CORE record. Link led to full-text PDF “Music Classes of Elementary School in Mongolia” in Japanese.
6. English abstract. No full-text.

Of the 19, only one was actually free. Thus the main problem here is that “free” does not = “full-text”, unless you have academic log-ons within South Korea.

Hathi now offers free public tools that provide…

“access to the text of the complete 16.7-million-item HathiTrust corpus for non-consumptive research, such as data mining and computational analysis, including items protected by copyright.”

Previously the tools could only run over Hathi’s public domain content.

A new article, “Ask a Catbrarian: Marketing Library Services Using a Cat”…

“Although Uggles was already well known within the library system and among many of the undergraduate students, Uggles’s popularity really took off once Uggles began ‘hiding’ around campus.”

It’s 2018 and… “we still lack the ability to record in MARC when a URL leads to open access content”. Apparently the librarian solution to that, in 2018, is to add an “unambiguous numeric marker in an 856 subfield” designating open access.

As well as the existing and active Open Access India Facebook Group, there’s now also a wider Forum for Open Access in South Asia Facebook Group. This includes India but has a wider remit either side, in terms of the geography.