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.

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.

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 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. You won't find its Leonardo da Vinci manuscript in this public archive, or the Lindisfarne Gospels. The images that have been released are the kind of curios that have for many years been published by companies like Dover for free use.

Beautiful Science at the British Library — in pictures. It invites the question: why not put everything into the public domain for free — even the Leonardos?

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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. You won't find its Leonardo da Vinci manuscript in this public archive, or the Lindisfarne Gospels. The images that have been released are the kind of curios that have for many years been published by companies like Dover for free use.

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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Technological feasibility is rarely the greatest factor in a release of this magnitude. Comments … Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion. It symobilizes a website link url. US Markets Loading Read next. For more information on acknowledging images with other citation styles, refer here. Since , British Library released more than 1 million images to Flickr Commons. 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. Redeem now. Description A descriptive note detailing the content and context of the digital collection. 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. Museums, collectors and libraries all have an interest in charging for the works of the dead.

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The images are arranged by different themes, such as book covers, illustrated letters, maps, flora and children book illustrations. We leveraged existing open-source code to interact with Flickr's well-documented API and performed part of the upload and maintenance of the collection using virtual machines hosted on Microsoft's Azure. 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. According to the British Library, however, it's a monograph from T. More than one million images have been uploaded so far, and, eventually, the library will ask viewers to help them label and annotate the images. 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. Reuse this content. Museums, collectors and libraries all have an interest in charging for the works of the dead. For more information on acknowledging images with other citation styles, refer here. Thanks for signing up!