The British Library has uploaded
one million public domain scans from 17th-19th century books to Flickr! They're embarking on an ambitious programme to
crowdsource novel uses and navigation tools for the huge corpus. Already, the manifest of image descriptions is available
through Github. This is a remarkable, public spirited, archival project, and the British Library is to be loudly applauded for it!
We plan to launch a crowdsourcing application at the beginning of next
year, to help describe what the images portray. Our intention is to use
this data to train automated classifiers that will run against the whole
of the content. The data from this will be as openly licensed as is
sensible (given the nature of crowdsourcing) and the code, as always,
will be under an open licence.
The manifests of images, with descriptions of the works that they were
taken from, are available on github and are also released under a
public-domain 'licence'. This set of metadata being on github should
indicate that we fully intend people to work with it, to adapt it, and
to push back improvements that should help others work with this
release.
There are very few datasets of this nature free for any use and by
putting it online we hope to stimulate and support research concerning
printed illustrations, maps and other material not currently studied.
Given that the images are derived from just 65,000 volumes and that the
library holds many millions of items.
If you need help or would like to collaborate with us, please contact us
on email, or twitter (or me personally, on any technical aspects)
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