Digitized portion of Jenkins Garrett Texas Postcard Collection now on Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia

The purpose of The Compass Rose is to raise awareness of Special Collections' resources and to foster the use of these resources. The blog series also reports significant new programs, initiatives, and acquisitions of Special Collections.

Appropriately in time for Public Domain Day 2021 (January 1), the entire digitized portion of the Jenkins Garrett Texas Postcard Collection, a total of 470 digitized postcards, has now been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons and many of the postcards have already been added to Wikipedia articles. These images form a treasure trove of mostly early-20th-century views of Texas, with the vast majority of the digitized portion of the collection documenting Fort Worth and Tarrant County.

In September 2020, the first phase of this project began with the initial identification of the Jenkins Garrett Texas Postcard Collection as highly likely to already be in the public domain. This project came on the heels of two other major Wikimedia Commons contribution projects at the UTA Libraries: one involving maps already in the public domain and the other involving two separate university photograph collections that were both released under Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 licenses. As was the case when contributing the university photograph collections, the next step for uploading the Garrett postcards to Wikimedia Commons was to change their license statements on our Digital Gallery. At the time, I argued for a CC0 public domain declaration for each image, and after discussion a CC0 license statement option was created and implemented for the Garrett postcards. While this was clearly preferable to the CC BY license used previously for university photographs, it was not an accurate means of asserting these works were in the public domain and caused problems that had to be resolved later, as I explain below.

From October 20 until November 23, 2020, I uploaded all 470 already-digitized Jenkins Garrett Texas Postcard Collection postcards to Wikimedia Commons in batches of up to 50 images at a time. Functionally, this was identical to the batch uploading of the two university photograph collections, as I copied metadata from the Digital Gallery, chiefly the "description" and "date" fields. I also ensured that the "source" field linked back to the Digital Gallery page specific to each image, the "author" field stated "Jenkins Garrett Texas Postcard Collection" (later changed, more on this below), the license was the CC0 public domain dedication (matching the license used in the Digital Gallery), and both content categories (ie, "1915 in Fort Worth, Texas," "Tarrant County Courthouse," etc.) and source categories ("Jenkins Garrett Texas Postcard Collection" and "Media contributed by the UTA Libraries") were added to all images. Uploading involved both using the Wikimedia Commons batch uploader, UploadWizard, and performing a quality-control check on each newly uploaded image. This process took about an hour and a half for each batch of 50 images, much faster than the image-by-image approach used for uploading public domain maps, but it caused errors and inaccuracies with the author fields and the license used that had to be fixed later (see below).

As I was uploading these postcards in batches, I also simultaneously added them to Wikipedia articles at my discretion. In practice, this meant adding images to articles or sections of articles that were either not already illustrated or had illustrations that were lower-quality identical or very similar images to a recently uploaded Garrett postcard. In these latter cases, I replaced the lower-quality image with a higher-quality one from the Garrett collection.

While adding images that you or your institution has contributed to Wikimedia Commons, it is important to keep in mind that the goal is not to add them wherever possible to Wikipedia articles in the single-minded pursuit of maximizing the visibility of your images. Rather, it is crucial to think about it from Wikipedia's perspective and ask the questions, "Does adding this image improve this article? Does it improve a reader's experience of this article?" As a Wikipedian with almost 15 years of experience, I understand this concern well and know the rule of thumb about conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia: "Would a neutral third party say that your edit has improved the encyclopedia?" If I believe that adding an image in a certain location will objectively improve the encyclopedia, then I will add it, and if I do not believe it will, then I will refrain from adding it. Of course, it is also important to remember that other Wikipedians will not always agree with my decisions, and in some cases will remove images I add or (more commonly) replace them with better (often higher-quality or more representative) images that become available at some point in the future.

As of January 13, 2021, 68 of the 470 Garrett postcards (14.5%) are used in Wikipedia articles. The vast majority have been added to English Wikipedia, which is not surprising considering the very local, Tarrant County-focused subject matter. There are 69 usages of these postcards on English Wikipedia (note that a single postcard can be used, and thus counted, multiple times in these "usages" statistics). Furthermore, two of these postcards are already used on French Wikipedia, plus one each on Arabic, Chinese, German, Serbian, and Spanish Wikipedias. This is a fairly surprising amount of linguistic diversity already achieved for postcards mainly depicting buildings and locations in Tarrant County.

On December 14, 2020, I met with my colleagues to discuss the wording of the license statement and rights holder fields for public domain materials on the Digital Gallery, at this point only the digitized portion of the Garrett postcards. The fundamental problem, as hinted above, was the use of the CC0 public domain declaration. While the Garrett postcards are all (or nearly all) in the public domain, the rationale was wrong. The CC0 is designed for creators who own the copyrights over works they create who then wish to voluntarily deed their works into the public domain. This was not what was happening in the case of the Garrett postcards. Instead, in this case the postcards themselves were published by the companies that created them and they had subsequently entered the public domain by some combination of their copyright terms expiring, not being renewed, or never existing due to failure to comply with the pre-1978 copyright notice stipulation. Because of all these concerns, at this meeting my colleagues and I deciding to use the "No Known Copyright" statement from RightsStatements.org as the starting point for our license statement for public domain materials instead of the CC0 public domain dedication. At the meeting we also reached the conclusion to use "Public Domain" instead of "UTA Libraries" for the rights holder fields of all public domain materials in the Digital Gallery, as this accurately describes their ownership status.

After this meeting, I have been going through all the uploaded Garrett postcards on Commons and replacing the CC0 public domain dedication originally used for their license with the appropriate public domain statements for each, depending on their reason for being in the public domain:

• Expired: published in the United States before January 1, 1926
• No notice: published in the United States without a compliant copyright notice before January 1, 1978
• Not renewed: published in the United States before January 1, 1964 (and with a compliant notice) and originally under copyright but the then-optional second half of the copyright term never began due to lack of renewal by the copyright holder

While I am fixing the public domain statements on these postcards one by one, I am also adding author information and (in some cases) more accurate dates. When this project is complete, the UTA Libraries will be able to use this updated metadata (especially the addition of author information) to improve the metadata for these images on the Digital Gallery. While collaborations with Wikimedia Commons are principally about enriching Commons and augmenting Wikipedia as well as increasing the discoverability and usefulness of the contributing partner's content, error reporting and other improvements to metadata are tangible additional benefits that contributing partners can realize, as in this case.

So far, I have positively identified 247 of the 470 uploaded postcards (52.6% of the uploaded collection) as in the public domain due to being expired and 189 (40.2%) as in the public domain due to being published without a copyright notice. A total of 30 (6.4%) do not have scans of their reverse sides on the Digital Gallery, meaning that the physical postcards will need to be checked for copyright status confirmation. Just four digitized postcards (0.9%) were published after January 1, 1926 and have a compliant copyright notice, meaning that they alone will need to be checked for copyright renewal records at the United States Copyright Office. It is possible that any number of these last four postcards may not yet be in the public domain, in which case they would be removed from Wikimedia Commons and their license statements on the Digital Gallery would be changed from "No Known Copyright" back to to the default license.

In total, there are over 13,000 postcards in the Jenkins Garrett Texas Postcard Collection, of which less than 4% have been digitized. Most of the ones already digitized are from Fort Worth or Tarrant County and were digitized due to a previous grant obtained by the UTA Libraries. It is my hope that the success and impact of uploading the already-digitized Garrett postcards to Wikimedia Commons and using them in Wikipedia can help the UTA Libraries make a strong case for obtaining grant funding to digitize other portions of the collection or, perhaps, even the entire remainder of it. Considering that the Curt Teich Postcard Archives Collection at the Newberry Library in Chicago, one of the largest and most important collections of postcards in the world, has just under 12,000 postcards of Texas already digitized, it is possible that the Jenkins Garrett Texas Postcard Collection is one of the largest collections of Texas postcards in the world.

Simply put, the UTA Libraries are sitting on an incredible historic resource, and the vast majority of these Garrett postcards are in the public domain. This means there are no legal restrictions on access, reproduction, or use. If the UTA Libraries are able to digitize them and make them widely accessible, we can overcome geographic and technological restrictions to access and use, and in doing so bring more remarkable glimpses of Texas history to anyone who is interested, anywhere in the world.