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Obviously, when you start your search for works in the public domain, you will begin your search online. While you can find just about anything and everything that you want online, you should also consider doing some offline searches as well, especially to find public domain works that are more rare – and ultimately more valuable.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t find public domain works that are valuable online as well. In fact, there are literally thousands of resources, and even some commercial directories of places where these works can be found.

You may want to start your online search at the Internet Public Library at http://www.ipl.org. There are numerous books that you can view online on a wide variety of topics.

The Project Gutenberg is another good source at http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog. Archive.org at http://www.archive.org provides over a hundred thousand links to public domain work.

If you are looking for public domain photographs, a great place to start your search is the Library of Congress at http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/ which houses approximately 13.7 million images – all of which are in the public domain. The US Department of Interior also has a nice collection of images at http://www.doi.gov/gallery.html .

The Library of congress also houses public domain broadcasts, motion pictures, and sound recordings at http://www.loc.gov/rr/mopic/. You can find more public domain film at http://www.buyoutfootage.com/pages/pd.html and The Digital Media Bank at http://www.csuchico.edu/lcmt/dmb/imagesources.html.

There is also a lot of software that is in the public domain. A great source for public domain software is The Public Domain Software Library at http://aixpdslib.seas.ucla.edu/ and Source Forge at http://sourceforge.net/index.php .

Finally, Wikipedia has a nice resource for finding public domain works in various genres. Here, you will find a comprehensive list of resources divided into numerous categories. Just choose the category that best suits your needs. Take a look at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Public_domain_resources

Because works that are in the public domain are free for the public to use, however they see fit, those works can be used to create new products – or even sold as they are for profit.

As an entrepreneur, you can use public domain works to add to an existing product line, or to create one if you don’t already have any products of your own. If you do not change the work in anyway, the author of the work remains the same. In other words, you can sell it, but you can’t put your name on it.

If you edit the work, however, or include bits and pieces of public domain work to create a new product, your name goes on it, and you can copyright it. This is one of the absolute fastest ways, next to purchasing resell rights, to create a product of your very own. While purchasing resell rights to a product may be faster, works that are in the public domain and used to create new products may prove to be more valuable – meaning you can charge more.

Using public domain works not only saves the time that may be involved in product creation, but it will also save you money when it comes to product creation or development. The work has been done already. Furthermore, if you know where to look, there are millions of public domain works that can be obtained freely.

When it comes to information, there is one solid fact that will never change. Information is information. It rarely changes. It may become outdated, and no longer useful – but it doesn’t usually change. Furthermore, outdated information can be ‘freshened up’ easily enough, and information that is no longer useful may also be made useful once again.

Remember, also, that public domain works does not just pertain to written materials. Millions of Films, music, photos, and even inventions are in the public domain – just waiting for some enterprising individual to come along, dust them off, and make them useful once again!

While you can find numerous public domain works that have already been digitized, you may come across public domain works that you want to use that are not digitized. In this case, you will need to convert them to a digital format before you can edit them.

In terms of photographs, videos, film, sound recordings, and music that are not digitized, it is fairly easy to convert these. Photographs can be scanned. Videos and film can be converted to DVD’s. Sound recordings and music can be converted to CD’s or MP3’s. If you do not have the equipment to make these conversions, you can hire a service to do this for you, and the costs are usually quite reasonable.

Work that is in print is a different matter. You cannot manipulate scanned writing. In most cases, you will have to retype the printed work into a document on your computer, or hire a typist to do this for you, if you are unable to find the work in digital format.

You will need to scan any photographs that are included in the work, and reassemble it on your computer to include it in the text. Hiring a typist doesn’t cost very much. Typists usually charge either by the word or by the page. Shop around for the best prices if you don’t want to do the work yourself.

If you are only using portions of written work, you only need to convert those portions that you intend to use, instead of the entire work. However, don’t be lazy where non-digitized printed work is concerned. Often work that is not available online will be worth more to you – and your potential customers – than work that is readily available online already.

In fact, you may be able to reproduce the entire work in digitized form and make a nice profit without changing anything else about the work, simply because it isn’t already available online. Always consider all of the possibilities!