British Library unleashes over a million images

Now this is a bit awesome...

If you pop here, you'll find 1,023,714 photos from "just" 65,000 volumes (their use of the word just!) owned by the British Library; "for anyone to use, remix and repurpose." So you can use them for illustrations, research, gifs, artwork...

Yup, wholly public domain folks. (although see the BL usage guide  here with requests about attribution etc.)

Details from the British Library can be found here, but in short, Microsoft digitised a load of books, gifted the images to the British Library, who have put them onto Flickr, and now they want you to get stuck in.

We want to collaborate with researchers and anyone else with a good idea for how to markup, classify and explore this set with an aim to improve the data and to improve and add to the tagging. We are looking to crowdsource information about what is depicted in the images themselves, as well as using analytical methods to interpret them as a whole.

We are very interested to hear what ideas and projects people use these images for and we would ideally like to collaborate with those who have been inspired to explore them.

"Lyrics of the Heart: with other poems" Author: Alaric Alexander WATTS

If you have some bright ideas, you can find the contact details in the article here. Otherwise, it's well worth a brew in hand and a browse around!