British library flickr

The British Library may have pushed at a bigger door than it knows. Britain's pre-eminent research library has just put a million images from its collections on to Flickr. These pictures are free not just to browse but to use and reuse: the library even wants members of the public to research them in an experiment in crowdsourced history. Which is all british library flickr fun — but it raises massive questions about whether it is ethical to copyright or restrict the publication of any historical art, ever, british library flickr.

I really like the image above. To me, it looks like a man enjoying some kind of steam-punk device designed for using your iPad in bed. According to the British Library, however, it's a monograph from T. I'm lucky to have ever seen the image at all. If it weren't for an incredibly ambitious project undertaken by the British Library, the image would probably have been lost in time, stuck in the back of a book on a back shelf of one of the world's biggest libraries. Thankfully, the British Library isn't content to let their unloved, unread books slowly turn into dust. Five years ago, the library began working with Microsoft to digitize maps , illustrations, photographs, diagrams, and more taken from centuries-old books, some famous, some virtually unheard of today.

British library flickr

Allow Reuse, Redistribute, Revise and Remix for educational and non-commercial purposes. Images uploaded to the site are released to Flickr Commons with no known copyright restrictions. Image from British Library Flickr Commons. For more information on acknowledging images with other citation styles, refer here. Please check their Terms of Use for full details before using images. You must be logged in to post a comment. Description A descriptive note detailing the content and context of the digital collection. Since , British Library released more than 1 million images to Flickr Commons. The images are arranged by different themes, such as book covers, illustrated letters, maps, flora and children book illustrations. Users may get started by viewing the Collection Highlights.

The end of all copyright restrictions on art made before would do a lot to level the playing field. The library then began to upload the images to Flickr, british library flickr, some with descriptions, some without. Reuse this content.

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The British Library may have pushed at a bigger door than it knows. Britain's pre-eminent research library has just put a million images from its collections on to Flickr. These pictures are free not just to browse but to use and reuse: the library even wants members of the public to research them in an experiment in crowdsourced history. Which is all great fun — but it raises massive questions about whether it is ethical to copyright or restrict the publication of any historical art, ever. The images set free by the British Library come from books published between the 17th and 19th centuries, but they do not include masterpieces. They are curiosities. A collagist like Max Ernst could have a lot of fun pasting them together to create surreal fantasies — and perhaps that is exactly what the internet will do with these steampunk exotica. It has not offered free use of its real visual treasures.

British library flickr

Browsing the collection is thrilling, like venturing into a wild and treasure-filled thicket without a map. This incredible visual bounty includes maps, drawings, illustrations, handwritten letters, geological diagrams, cartoons, comics, posters, and decorative scrolls. While each image on Flickr links back to a PDF of the source book, the sheer volume means that librarians cannot have a good handle on the nature of each image that the Mechanical Curator has flagged. So how have people been using the images? Because they are in the public domain and authors technically have no obligation to credit the Library, the sky is the limit. The images have been used on stickers, coloring books, games, music album covers and, inevitably a few Photoshop-enabled gags. He also took an illustration of ships coming to shore and had it printed it on a rug. The Library is hoping that the rich trove of visual material will create alluring starting points for both scholarly and artistic projects. Although the books were no longer protected by copyright, their obscurity was cloaking them from public attention.

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Facebook Email icon An envelope. As we continue to digitize at scale we and researchers will need more tools such as these to make sense of images pulled from pages of old texts. Reuse this content. Adam Taylor. Our aim is to learn more about the images, be able to curate them in meaningful and useful ways, and to see them used in innovative and creative projects. BL: We have been getting inquiries from individuals asking for permission to use the images which I think illustrates just how rare a resource like this might be. And we hope the collection serves as a great resource for those working to improve technology around image recognition and automatic classification of historical images. BI: The work has been shared in a way that allows the images to be re-used. BI: Have all the images been inspected by British Library researchers before, or are some being seen for the first time? The concept may be the opposite of the Snapchat-era ideal of ephemerality, yet it seems to have proved very popular — within a few days, the images had recieved 6. Images uploaded to the site are released to Flickr Commons with no known copyright restrictions.

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BI: The work has been shared in a way that allows the images to be re-used. When will holders of great art recognise that it now circulates freely online, and stop charging print publishers, authors, magazines and newspapers for its use? Stay up to date with what you want to know. The end of all copyright restrictions on art made before would do a lot to level the playing field. Read next. Subject Broad terms or phrases that describe, identify, or interpret the digital image collection and what it depicts or expresses. This is true of all works of art regardless of when they were made: I have personally forked out for paintings that predate BL: The power of this project is to see and explore printed works in novel and surprising ways, to experiment with ways of researching that is not simply 'viewing a book, online'. It costs a bomb to publish art books because the rights have to be paid for each picture. They are curiosities. BI: How many more books and images does the British Library have that could be digitized and uploaded in such a way? Five years ago, the library began working with Microsoft to digitize maps , illustrations, photographs, diagrams, and more taken from centuries-old books, some famous, some virtually unheard of today. We know that the physical books have been in our collections for centuries and available for researchers in our reading rooms. You won't find its Leonardo da Vinci manuscript in this public archive, or the Lindisfarne Gospels.