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The National Children's Literacy Website is a unique children's literacy initiative and is part of the Soho Center's National Children's Literacy Information Project - a not-for-profit literacy initiative dedicated to advancing the literacy skills of young children, promoting literacy as an integral factor in the growth of society, and enhancing literacy in a variety of home and child care settings. We believe that reading is a fundamental skill needed by all, and we are proud of what we are doing to help children learn to read.

More than any other single skill, the ability to read - and read well - allows a child to succeed in school,  learn about the world, function in society, and someday have decent job options. Enhancing children's literacy is at the heart of the Soho Center's NATIONAL CHILDREN'S LITERACY INFORMATION project - a national children's literacy initiative.

The Soho Center is committed to promoting children's literacy in child care settings and home settings. Whether you are a family child care provider, a teacher in a child care center or Head Start program, or a parent of a pre-school or school-age child - there's a lot you can do.

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First Book is a non-profit that provides new books and educational resources - for free and at low cost - to schools and programs serving children in need, from birth to age 18. Our purpose is to raise the quality of education for children by making sure they have access to the resources they need to be successful in school and in life.

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First Book is able to make new, high-quality books and resources available to schools and programs like yours thanks to our partners in the publishing industry, who want to be sure the books are going to organizations serving children from low-income families. We take that promise to our partners very seriously. By registering, you are giving us the information we need to ensure that our books and resources are reaching the children in greatest need.

New York Public Library Labs, Spotlight on the Public Domain by Shana Kimball, January 5, 2016

Today we are proud to announce that out-of-copyright materials in NYPL Digital Collections are now available as high-resolution downloads. No permission required, no hoops to jump through: just go forth and reuse! 

The release of more than 180,000 digitized items represents both a simplification and an enhancement of digital access to a trove of unique and rare materials: a removal of administration fees and processes from public domain content, and also improvements to interfaces — popular and technical — to the digital assets themselves. Online users of the NYPL Digital Collections website will find more prominent download links and filters highlighting restriction-free content; while more technically inclined users will also benefit from updates to the Digital Collections API enabling bulk use and analysis, as well as data exports and utilities posted to NYPL's GitHub account. These changes are intended to facilitate sharing, research and reuse by scholars, artists, educators, technologists, publishers, and Internet users of all kinds. All subsequently digitized public domain collections will be made available in the same way, joining a growing repository of open materials.

To encourage novel uses of our digital resources, we are also now accepting applications for a new Remix Residency program. Administered by the Library's digitization and innovation team, NYPL Labs, the residency is intended for artists, information designers, software developers, data scientists, journalists, digital researchers, and others to make transformative and creative uses of digital collections and data,and the public domain assets in particular. Two projects will be selected, receiving financial and consultative support from Library curators and technologists.

To provide further inspiration for reuse, the NYPL Labs team has also released several demonstration projects delving into specific collections, as well as a visual browsing tool allowing users to explore the public domain collections at scale. These projects, which suggest just a few of the myriad investigations made possible by fully opening these collections, include:

• a "mansion builder" game, exploring floor plans of grand turn-of-the-century New York apartments; 
• a then-and-now comparison of New York's Fifth Avenue, juxtaposing 1911 wide angle photographs with Google Street View; and
• a "trip planner" using locations extracted from mid-20th century motor guides that listed hotels, restaurants, bars, and other destinations where Black travelers would be welcome.

The public domain release spans the breadth and depth of NYPL's holdings, from the Library's rich New York City collection, historic maps, botanical illustrations, unique manuscripts, photographs, ancient religious texts, and more. Materials include:

• Berenice Abbott's iconic documentation of 1930s New York for the Federal Art Project
• Farm Security Administration photographs by Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, and others
• Manuscripts of American literary masters like Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Papers and correspondence of founding American political figures like Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison
• Sheet music for popular American songs at the turn of the 20th century
• WPA-era lithographs, etchings, and pastels by African American artists
• Lewis Hine's photographs of Ellis Island immigrants and social conditions in early 20th century America
• Anna Atkins' cyanotypes of British algae, the first recorded photographic work by a woman (1843)
• Handscrolls of the Tale of Genji, created in 1554
• Medieval and Renaissance illuminated manuscripts from Western Europe
• Over 20,000 maps and atlases documenting New York City, North America, and the world
• More than 40,000 stereoscopic views documenting all regions of the United States
   
  Visit nypl.org/publicdomain for information about the materials related to the public domain update and links to all of the projects demonstrating creative reuse of public domain materials. Go forth, and reuse!