Free to Use (and here it is to use) Browser Extension for Opening Up Public Domain Rabbit Holes of Curiosity

A three line title! There you go. I’ve written a few times about a favorite web diversion/excursion, triggered by a 6+ year old browser tool that does something magical.

Think of how many times you open a new browser tab/window. What is there? White space? A few logos or thing the browser maker wants to toss you? It’s boring.

I found the Library of Congress Labs Free to Use Browser Extension in 2018. What it does is insert in that blank window a random image from the LoC’s vast public domain collection. Often I shrug and go on to my tasks. Other times I might page through them (infinite set). But often, something catches my eye and makes me curious. A particular place. The expression of a person’s face. An odd form of transportation. And sometimes I just want to learn more.

Public Domain as the Opener of Glorious Rabbit Holes

Twice in 2023 I was stopped by error messages, that I managed to fix with minor edits of some manifest.json file in the download. In January 2023, the fix was changing a “2” to a “3”. In November, it was deleting a few lines. And I got i working! After the first time, I got in contact with the LoC Lab people and they fixed their source. But the second time, maybe they missed my email.

I finally decided to just package it up and make my version available on GitHub. It’s still some manual seps, but very doable. And I think i only works in Chrome. Shrug.

This tool was created by Flynn Shannon, an LoC intern from Kenyon College (I did once tell Joe Murphy about this fame), and his LoC blog post from 2018 tells the full story. I found Flynn’s own GitHub but there is no source code there. Interestingly it looks like in 2020 Flynn built a variant as a Chrome Extension for the Aukland War Museum.

That’s for a future date.

I’ve lost track of a few of my ventures triggered by this bit of public domain randomness, well a few are sitting in open tabs waiting their turn for a blog post.

The Work Flow with a Bookmarklet

There’s another element in the mix. You see these images are drawn from the Flickr Commons, but I found mostly the records you can click to see at the Library of Congress mention this connection, but provide no link.

I find the version in flickr is more useful– for sites that autoembed, I can do that with a Flickr URL. And I can use my own Flickr CC Attribution Helper bookmarklet to generate a quick attribution. But the big value is that quite often, commenters in flickr add additional information, links, identifying people or places the LoC missed.

So I wove together a little JavaScript browser bookmarklet that helps find images in the Flickr Commons using the text I highlight in the LoC web page. To get one yourself, drag the link for Flickr Commons to your web browser bookmarks/favorites bar.

Here’s how it goes. I open one of those new browser windows, and am captivated/curiosity triggered by an image. Hover over the image, and click its title in the bottom left.

This opens the LoC entry for Smokey’s News Stand, Alabama Avenue, Selma, Alabama. I select in the browser, the key text:

When I click my Flickr Commons browser bookmarklet tool, it does a search on that text in the Flickr Commons. In this case, it’s easy as there’s only one Smokeys, sometimes you get a few but its easy to find the one you saw. And now, I have this image where I can do more with it, from Flickr. Like using the Flickr CC Attributor to create a copy/paste code to embed it here, with full atribution.

Just Today I Opened a New Browser Window…

… and go distracted because the old 1870s stereogram photo showed some mounains I know- The San Francisco Peaks near Flagstaff.

It’s one of the many classic photos byTimothy O’Sullivan done for those late 19th century surveys of the American west. My distraction compelled me to remix this one of my own photos near this location

I can’t fully explain why I might do this, except it fills me with some joy and curious thinking.

If you would like some visual randomness of public domain images, enjoy the distraction of the revised Free to Use Browser Extension of course free for you to use (I hope it works!).

Thanks Library of Congress and Flynn Shannon where ever he is for giving me 6+ years of this joy.

Updates

It happened again!

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Featured Image: Free As in Rain Soaked Cardboard flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)