Historical illustrations of digitized books available on Flickr

Share

A researcher at Georgetown University in Washington DC, Kalev Leetaru, is adding millions of newly digitized images to the photo-sharing website Flickr, in the framework of a fellowship sponsored by Yahoo!, that is the owner of Flickr.

flickr_image

The project aims to make available up to 14.6 million images on Flickr, all extracted from books, magazines and newspapers published over a 500 year period and digitized by the Internet Archive organization. Currently, the collection uploaded in Flickr comprises about 2.6 million public domain images, extracted and catalogued after the digitization processes.

Image from page 496 of "The boy travellers in Australasia ..." (1889)

Image from page 496 of “The boy travellers in Australasia …” (1889)

The digitization activity of libraries, in facts, focuses on text, rather than on images, and makes the book pages available as PDF or text searchable works, while the illustrations are difficult to be search and found. That’s because the OCR program that digitizes the millions of public domain books to converge in the Internet Archive normally discards the illustrations, and this is definitely a pity considering the richness and value of at least some of those ancient images, and in any case considering that most of the images that are in the books, newspapers and catalogues are not available anywhere else in the world.

The code developed by Leetaru recovers those parts of the page which include images: the images are cropped, cleaned up, and uploaded to Flickr along with the text that appears next to them (about 500 words before and 500 after the image), along with detailed description ((title, year of publication, authors, and publisher) and searchable tags that make retrieval very easy.

“Stretching half a millennium, it’s amazing to see the total range of images and how the portrayals of things have changed over time.” said Leetaru to BBC.

Surf the whole collection:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/

Read more:

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28976849

http://ebookfriendly.com/internet-archive-free-images-flickr/

http://www.openculture.com/2014/08/new-flickr-archive-makes-available-2-6-million-images-from-books.html

 

Leave a Reply


Related Articles

EuroMed 2024: the 10th International Euro-Mediterranean Conference on Digital Cultural Heritage
Organized by Cyprus University of Technology, conference EuroMed 2024 offers the Cultural Heritage community the opportunity to come together and exchange our know-how, explore our research and discuss development in our field, current and future, from both regional and global perspectives. The conference, celebrating its 10th edition in 2024, provides a unique opportunity to present results, review outcomes, and draw new inspiration with our friends, colleagues and peers. EuroMed 2024 fo...
TWA cultural heritage Digitisation Grant 2023 for UK-based digitisation projects
Stemming from a conversation around the impact of funding on the heritage sector, the TWA Digitisation Grant has adapted and evolved over the years, responding directly to the real and current needs of the heritage organisations it seeks to support. This year, the fund offers three grants of up to £3000 for the winners, and Up to £1,000 in match funding for all other eligible applicants. The fundings can be spent on any UK-based digitisation project, provided in the form of TownsWeb Archi...
EUreka3D project: latest updates on 3D digitisation of heritage collections
all images in this post courtesy of CRDI/Ajuntament de Girona via the EUreka3D Twitter profile. The EUreka3D project coordinated by Photoconsortium has just started the action on high-quality 3D digitisation, which will make great collections of cultural heritage 3D digitised objects accessible to everyone in the Europeana website. The content provided by project partners is very diverse, and ranges from monuments at risk to archaeological objects, early cinema items and filigree paper moulds....
EUreka3D website launched today
We are enthusiast to announce the launch of the official website of EUreka3D, a project co-funded by the Digital Europe Programme of the European Union, that aims to support the digital transformation of the cultural heritage sector, by offering capacity building, training and new services to Cultural Heritage institutions, facing the challenge of advancing in the digitization effort, especially in the field of 3D access, storage and sharing. EUreka3D is a project coordinated by Photoconsorti...