Millions of historic images posted to Flickr

by Robert Miller, Global Director of Books, Internet Archive

flickr_image

“Reading a book from the inside out!”. Well not quite, but a new way to read our eBooks has just been launched. Check out this great BBC article:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-28976849

Here is the fabulous Flickr commons collection:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages

BBC articleAnd here is our welcome to Flickr’s Common Post:
http://blog.flickr.net/en/2014/08/29/welcome-the-internet-archive-to-the-commons/

What is it and how did it get done?
A Yahoo research fellow at Georgetown University, Kalev Leetaru, extracted over 14 million images from 2 million Internet Archive public domain eBooks that span over 500 years of content.  Because we have OCR’d the books, we have now been able to attach about 500 words before and after each image. This means you can now see, click and read about each image in the collection. Think full-text search of images!

How many images are there?
As of today, 2.6 million of the 14 million images have been uploaded to Flickr Commons. Soon we will be able to add continuously to this collection from the over 1,000+ new eBooks we scan each day. Dr. Simon Chaplin, Head of the Wellcome Library says, “This way of discovering and reading a book will help transform our medical heritage collection as it goes up online. This is a big step forward and will bring digitized book collections to new audiences.”

What is fun to do with this collection?
Trying typing in the word “telephone’ and enjoy what images appear? Curious about how death has been characterized over 500 years of images – type in “mordis”. Feeling good about health care – type in medicine and prepare to be amazed. Remember, all of these images are in the public domain!

Future plans?
We will be working with our wonderful friends at Flickr and our great Library partners to make this collection even more interesting –  more images, more sub-collections and some very interesting ideas of how to use some image recognition tools to help us learn more about, well, anything!

Questions about this collection, projects or things to come?
Email me at robert@archive.org

35 thoughts on “Millions of historic images posted to Flickr

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  4. Daniel Capilla

    Wonderful! An easy and fun way to discover new books through their artwork and images with a simple search on Flickr. Good job!

    Thanks to the Internet Archive!
    Greetings from Málaga, Spain.

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  9. Nicole Simon

    Robert, this indeed looks like a treasure and it is also a big part what what I love about the internet.

    My question: I read on the bbc article “The pictures range from 1500 to 1922, when copyright restrictions kick in.” Are these also public domain world wide or just from an american point of copyright law? Thanks.

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  13. Chris

    A great project!!! Thank you for your good work on free information!!!

    I like the direct links from Flickr to the catalog entries and to the book viewer. But I found no links from IA to Flickr. Do you plan to put links from the IA catalog entries to Flickr?

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  33. Juergen Plieninger

    Hello,
    could you please tell me, how to search the fotos at flickr. Its just because there is no possibility to set limits just for the photos of the internet archive. I can only search within the whole content of flickr.

    Best regards,

    Juergen

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