Download for Free 2.6 Million Images from Books Published Over Last 500 Years on Flickr

Thanks to Kalev Lee­taru, a Yahoo! Fel­low in Res­i­dence at George­town Uni­ver­si­ty, you can now head over to a new col­lec­tion at Flickr and search through an archive of 2.6 mil­lion pub­lic domain images, all extract­ed from books, mag­a­zines and news­pa­pers pub­lished over a 500 year peri­od. Even­tu­al­ly this archive will grow to 14.6 mil­lion images.

This new Flickr archive accom­plish­es some­thing quite impor­tant. While oth­er projects (e.g., Google Books) have dig­i­tized books and focused on text — on print­ed words — this project con­cen­trates on images. Lee­taru told the BBC, “For all these years all the libraries have been dig­i­tiz­ing their books, but they have been putting them up as PDFs or text search­able works.”  “They have been focus­ing on the books as a col­lec­tion of words. This inverts that.”

The Flickr project draws on 600 mil­lion pages that were orig­i­nal­ly scanned by the Inter­net Archive. And it uses spe­cial soft­ware to extract images from those pages, plus the text that sur­rounds the images. I arrived at the image above when I searched for “auto­mo­bile.” The page asso­ci­at­ed with the image tells me that the image comes from an old edi­tion of the icon­ic Amer­i­can news­pa­per, The Sat­ur­day Evening Post. A relat­ed link puts the image in con­text, allow­ing me to see that we’re deal­ing with a 1920 ad for an REO Speed­wag­on. Now you know the ori­gin of the band’s name!

I should prob­a­bly add a note about how to search through the archive, because it’s not entire­ly obvi­ous. From the home page of the archive, you can do a key­word search. As you’re fill­ing in the key­word, Flickr will autopop­u­late the box with the words “Inter­net Archive Book Images’ Pho­to­stream.” Make sure you click on those autopop­u­lat­ed words, or else your search results will include images from oth­er parts of Flickr.

Or here’s an eas­i­er approach: sim­ply go to this inte­ri­or page and con­duct a search. It should yield results from the book image archive, and noth­ing more.

In case you’re won­der­ing, all images can be down­loaded for free. They’re all pub­lic domain.

More infor­ma­tion about the new Flickr project can be found at the Inter­net Archive.

In the relat­eds below, you can find oth­er great image archives that recent­ly went online.

via the BBC and Peter Kauf­man

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Fol­ger Shake­speare Library Puts 80,000 Images of Lit­er­ary Art Online, and They’re All Free to Use

The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art Puts 400,000 High-Res Images Online & Makes Them Free to Use

New York Pub­lic Library Puts 20,000 Hi-Res Maps Online & Makes Them Free to Down­load and Use

The British Library Puts 1,000,000 Images into the Pub­lic Domain, Mak­ing Them Free to Reuse & Remix

The Rijksmu­se­um Puts 125,000 Dutch Mas­ter­pieces Online, and Lets You Remix Its Art

Where to Find Free Art Images & Books from Great Muse­ums, and Free Books from Uni­ver­si­ty Press­es