CMU School of Drama


Wednesday, September 03, 2014

Internet Archive uploads more than 14 million public domain images to Flickr

Boing Boing: Kalev Leetaru programatically recovered all the images that were discarded by the OCR program that digitizes the millions of public domain books scanned by the Archive; these were cropped, cleaned up, and uploaded to Flickr with the text that appears before and after them, and links to see their whole scanned page.

3 comments:

AAKennar said...

26,200 are the amount of flickr pages it took up to post all of those images. So yes it is pretty kool that we have free range to thousands of pictures, but what I think it the best is the fact someone actually did it. Kalev Leetaru, who I believe is a man, is an amazingly patient and awesome person. Truly this gentleman honestly saved all of this work for everything today and tomorrow. What is also amazing is that, I am presuming, that his job let him do this. I am sure he had help, but his job paid him to scan and Edit thousands of pictures. Personally I could see this to be very useful to designers to just be able to scroll through pictures for idea and the best part is the image is free, so no lawsuits attached. I am grateful to some people for their dedication and odd obsessions, because those pictures would probably be in the trash unless someone would sign AI for it.

AAKennar said...

Where ever I said thousand, change it to Million.

Emily Bordelon said...

It's wonderful that someone took all the time to provide these images for the public. It's especially great that the images are all in one place, easily accessible, and completely free. The recovery, editing, and sourcing must have taken forever, but it is such a great resource for people to use. The dedication and patience this must have taken is simply amazing. I hope that this collection comes in handy in the future to designers, students, and teachers. I hope to use it for reference and research pictures, too.