Biography books images public domain

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.

Biography books images public domain

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 dra