I stumbled across this as I was researching something else and wanted to mention it here in case someone else found it useful. The Open Clip Art Library is a collection of clip art that’s been placed in the public domain and is free to use. There was apparently an old site, which had about 7000 items (that content is still available) and a new site, which has over 11,000 items. It’s at http://openclipart.org.

The front page of the site has an overview and a list of the most recent items added. You can do a search through a box on the upper right part of the site, but I found browsing tags a lot easier. The tag page for hardware had 87 items. Items are listed with contributor name and date, as well as the tags for the item and the license (all the ones I saw were public domain.)

Click on the name of the clip art sample and you’ll get a couple more details, as well as download links for getting the clip art in PNG or SVG format. (With my Firefox that seemed to be that the image was loaded in the browser and you right-clicked to save it to your hard drive.) You don’t have to register to download items.

I can imagine a lot of people who have to do organization newsletters or put up explanatory, community Web sites that would find this collection very handy! One caveat: there are some clip art items here that might, uh, startle you a bit if you’re looking for some extra graphics for your church newsletter. They’re tagged generically but all the ones I saw were clearly marked, “This upload might be ‘Not Safe For Work'” in red. I only saw these items within the context of a few tags; if you want to avoid that kind of content just mind the bright red labels.