This site is dedicated to history and not just concerning Manchester, so we are delighted to see that the British Library has given everyone an early Christmas present and released over a million images onto Flickr Commons for anyone to use, remix and repurpose.

The images have been taken from the pages of 17th, 18th and 19th century books digitised by Microsoft who have gifted the scanned images to the Library which has released them back into the Public Domain.

The images themselves cover a startling mix of subjects: There are maps, geological diagrams, beautiful illustrations, comical satire, illuminated and decorative letters, colourful illustrations, landscapes, wall-paintings and much more that even the library are not aware of.

Image taken from page 4 of 'Views of Old Manchester'

According to the release notes, they are looking for new, inventive ways to navigate, find and display these ‘unseen illustrations’. The images were plucked from the pages as part of the ‘Mechanical Curator’, a creation of the British Library Labs project. Each image is individually addressable, online, and Flickr provides an API to access it and the image’s associated description.

In the new year, the library plans to launch a crowdsourcing application to help describe what the images portray. 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.

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