The British Library has released over one million scanned images into the public domain. A post on the British Library’s Digital Scholarship blog reveals that the public domain – i.e. freely usable – images which have been made available via the British Library’s Flickr page, originate from 17th, 18th and 19th century books. They were digitised by Microsoft from 65,000 books.
Microsoft and the British Library started collaborating eight years ago. The contents of 100,000 books should be searchable in the near future via Microsoft’s book search project.
All the images are provided with details of their origin and year of publication. The British Library is planning a crowdsourcing project as the next stage for automatically classifying the content of the images. The images’ data has been made available on github by the British Library. The code is being made available under an open licence.