10 Years of Pomological Watercolors

If anybody just wants to download the hi-res images, Internet Archive is your friend: https://archive.org/details/usda-pomological-watercolor-coll...

You can have fun with 'em since they're public domain (:

Note 1: The metadata, such as title, author, etc. seem to be missing. If anyone knows of a collection with all that included, let me know (it's not in the EXIF either, I spot-checked).

EDIT: aha! Here is metadata, which you can correlate to the image files: https://github.com/Wumms/pomological

Note 2: I saw this in the MARC catalog record:

  Use of the images in the U.S. Department of Agriculture Pomological
  Watercolor Collection is not restricted, but a statement of attribution is
  required. Please use the following attribution statement: "U.S. Department
  of Agriculture Pomological Watercolor Collection. Rare and Special
  Collections, National Agricultural Library, Beltsville, MD 20705"

I'm also noticing there is no explicit license on the official page. If it's public domain, attribution is not required. If it is not public domain, they should clarify the license (pretty sure this is indeed public domain).

Ambiguity like this is way too common...

Yeah, agreed it's weird.

For another data point, this catalog.data.gov site[1] lists the license as "us-pd" (ie public domain in the USA). But then yeah, like you said the attribution demand is invalid.

[1] https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/u-s-department-of-agricultu...

I wonder how the USDA can demand anything regarding images created well before the copyright cutoff of 1929. I strongly suspect that's boilerplate text with no actual force.

Oh definitely no force behind it, but just annoying to see. These kinds of issues don't exactly block usage, but can plant a lot of confusion or hesitation for potential users. I wish agencies proactively embraced "please go use this awesome stuff" mentality vs gatekeeping by default.