Over 2 Million Historical Pictures Are Now Available on Flickr

September 2, 2014
Internet Archive Book Images features over 2 millions historical pictures on Flickr. This tremendous work has been done by Kalev Leetaru from Georgetown University. The pictures and drawings included in this resource are extracted from over 600 million library book pages scanned in by the Internet Archive organization.



Recognizing the fact that the digitization of the human knowledge has overlooked the presence of pictures in most of the books and works that were turned into PDF formats, Kalev took it upon him to source the pictures that are buried within these digitized books and arrange them in a format that can be easily searched and accessed. Kalev's project is sponsored by Yahoo, the owner of Flickr.
"For all these years all the libraries have been digitising their books, but they have been putting them up as PDFs or text searchable works," he told the BBC.
Kalev has uploaded over 2.6 millions pictures that range from the year 1500 to 1922. This data mine of pictures is easily searchable using tags that have been automatically added to them. As a teacher, youprobably could draw on this resource to look for CC licensed pictures to use with students in class. Give it a try and see if you like it.

Courtesy of BBC

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