“The History of the Ordinary,” a story featuring Laura Bang, Digital and Special Collections curatorial assistant, and Ruth Martin, an intern in the Digital Library, was published Jan. 7 in The Public Domain Review. The article features a scrapbook created by the New York City Fire Department’s Company 62 in the early 1900s and currently housed in Special Collections. The scrapbook was digitized and is available online through the Digital Library. Michael Foight, Special Collections and Digital Library coordinator, says, “This is a nice publicity piece for us by one of the clearinghouses of new ‘cool’ stuff on the Internet … likely to generate much interest across the Internet …”

The Public Domain Review is an online, not-for-profit journal which features works in the public domain: that is, works no longer under copyright. The Journal, founded in 2011, is a project of the Open Knowledge Foundation, which was itself founded in 2004 in Cambridge, United Kingdom.