Video: British Library uploads a million illustrations to Flickr
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
A father with a child in Palestine, an Indian musician, a woman from a colonized African country - faces from the past who tell thousands of stories. The British Library has posted a million illustrations from books published in the 17th and 19th centuries on the Internet.
For decades, these images have been hidden in the pages of books in the archives of the library, accessible only to a narrow circle of dedicated researchers. But now a series of paintings from the past has turned out to be open to the whole world. The texts published in the 17th and 19th centuries were carefully scanned and uploaded to the World Wide Web as part of the "Unseen Illustrations" project.
The library's researchers and curators urge the public to take the images and use them for any purpose, since all copyright terms have already expired on them. The origin and history of some of the images is still a mystery, so the staff of the British Library hope that there will be people to help them gather more information about the illustrations.
Published materials include maps, art illustrations, letters and copies of wall murals. To date, the project team has processed 65,000 volumes.
Since Friday, when the first scanned images were uploaded to the Flickr Libraries [Flickr is a service for storing and using digital photos and videos by users], they have amassed over 6 million views and shares on news and personal blogs.
The British Library commented on the event on its website: “We can know from which edition, volume, and from which page the image was taken, but we do not know anything about the image itself. We fully encourage people to want to work with these images, processing and enhancing them. Thus, they will help the rest of the interested in working with the release. There are very few images of this kind in the public domain. By putting them online, we hope to initiate and support existing research into print illustration, cartography and other areas in which our images can be useful."
Another library that has provided the general public with a glimpse into its archives this year is the Library of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
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