British Library has released over a million images onto Flickr Commons

http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/2013/12/a-million-first-steps.html

by mds • 13 years ago

193 57 13 years ago

britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk

yapcguy2• 13 years ago

Great, but why should the British Library, a non-profit charity and UK taxpayer assisted institution put these images on the servers of a US based for-profit company?

There are a lot of talented Brits in the Bay Area, but there are also many great UK based programmers and companies in the UK who could have developed a home-grown solution. This is embarrassing on many levels.

jamesbritt• 13 years ago

[B]ut there are also many great UK based programmers and companies in the UK who could have developed a home-grown solution.

Would that have been more cost effective?

cobrausn• 13 years ago

The first few lines in the article mention that the bulk of the work was done by Microsoft in digitizing the photos.

smtddr• 13 years ago

I'm of the mindset that developing a home-grown/in-house solution when there are time-tested & proven solutions out there is generally a mistake unless you're trying to innovate and offer it to the public. I worked at a place where the devs thought apache2, django, rails, etc. were too slow so they made their own web-server re-implementing the whole HTTP 1.1 protocol from scratch....

simplemath• 13 years ago

oh god, that sounds... excruciating

PavlovsCat• 13 years ago

There is rarely an existing solution for your specific needs. And sometimes, at some point it becomes more work to tweak an existing thing into what you want it to be, than just do it from scratch. Yes, you can't always know that beforehand, but that doesn't mean it's always safer to err on the side of taking something off the shelve.

That said, seeing how the images are creative commons licensed, it would still make sense to put them on flickr, too :P The more, the merrier.

7952• 13 years ago

A UK government agency tried to release wartime aerial photos for free on the web and it was a disaster because the site was always overwhelmed with traffic. Now you can only get those photos by paying. This story could easily get picked up by a large news organisation and it needs to be hosted on something with lots of capacity.

ceejayoz2• 13 years ago

Great, but why should the British Library, a non-profit charity and UK taxpayer assisted institution put these images on the servers of a US based for-profit company?

Why shouldn't they? It's to everyone's benefit for these to be as widely distributed as reasonably possible.

There are a lot of talented Brits in the Bay Area, but there are also many great UK based programmers and companies in the UK who could have developed a home-grown solution.

These folks can now use the Flickr API to download each and every one of the photos and code to their hearts' content.

revscat• 13 years ago

Why shouldn't they? It's to everyone's benefit for these to be as widely distributed as reasonably possible

Because Flickr could one day be shut down, and eventually will be, however far on the future that may be. For resources like this such a disruption will be painful.

I'm not saying it is a bad idea, only that I understand the long-term hesitation in this.

timClicks• 13 years ago

You're speaking there as a tech-informed taxpayer who is being slightly nationalistic.

Most taxpayers, even if they agree with you, are likely to be more worried by the prospect of the British Library developing its own tools for access to its digital collections when perfectly adequately ones already exist.

By leveraging Flickr, the library frees itself of the problems of dealing with tens of millions of users attempting to access its material. Memory institutions have centuries of experience dealing with the lone, dedicated researcher. They're less used to dealing with massive number of researchers accessing collections at the same time.

icebraining3• 13 years ago

By leveraging Flickr, the library frees itself of the problems of dealing with tens of millions of users attempting to access its material.

We already have an open and free technology for that: Bittorrent.

vidarh2• 13 years ago

To make them more readily available. Their job is to preserve and provide access to them. The images are in the public domain (donated by Microsoft who did the scanning, by the way) - if any UK based programmers want to do something with them, they can.

lovemenot• 13 years ago

Over the years, there have been many instances of short-sighted technology selection by publically funded British institutions. However, I don't think this is such a case. That these documents are going into the public domain means Flickr can assert no rights over them.　If Flickr is able to profit from hosting them then competitors will surely do so too. Meanwhile, this will cost the Library nothing to implement or operate. They can just rehost if and when Yahoo! Flickrs out. Developing against the Flickr API presents the usual risks to third-parties, but that need not be the concern of the Library.

AlexMuir2• 13 years ago

Brightsolid is a Dundee-based company that has digitised quite a bit of British library material as a sort of public-private partnership. For example, the British Newspaper Archive - http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/

I'm of two minds as to whether this has been a good thing. On one hand it's digitised content that was previously only in paper form, but on the other that content is now charged for, and likely will remain so for a long time due to contracts. Effectively it has been put back into copyright.

Flickr is a perfectly reasonable tool for the job.

capnrefsmmat• 13 years ago

Why not Wikimedia Commons?

Several major museums and libraries (including the US's National Archives) have donated major collections.

chris_wot2• 13 years ago

Wikimedia Commons could quite easily download them and store them on their servers.

ArekDymalski• 13 years ago

This is a great initiative but as long as these images aren't reasonably tagged they'll remain undiscovered.

mongol• 13 years ago

Yes but they have a strategy to address that:

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.

emhart• 13 years ago

Don't count out dogged historians. We spend a lot of our lives looking at material not quite relevant to our research in order to find that one gem that answers a question.

That said, I am very pleased to read the other reply that mentioned their plans. I'm not waiting, though. I'm very excited to dive in immediately.

sheff• 13 years ago

For any HN'ers based in London the British Library in St Pancras is a fantastic resource, and their Business and IP Centre ( http://www.bl.uk/bipc/ ) has an easy signup for a Readers Pass for entrepreneurs.

AlexMuir2• 13 years ago

I tried getting some work done there a couple of years ago. All the desks were taken and the internet was a nightmare to get onto and highly restricted. Things may have changed since then. I tried going into the Business centre but lacked the required ID.

wavefunction• 13 years ago

It's a Library rather than a Starbucks, innit?

grey-area2• 13 years ago

I think it's set up to help the people looking at the physical resources they have there (older and rare books on paper mostly), rather than someone looking to work exclusively with an internet connection. If you're not interested in the books, it is of course not a great place to work, though the cafe is pretty good for meetings.

I'm not sure it's really an appropriate place for entrepreneurs unless they are interested in accessing or using the books somehow. When all the other libraries have shut down or turned into Internet access centers, this one will still be valuable as a repository of the books we choose to keep as physical artefacts.

gabemart• 13 years ago

This is fantastic, but I do have one small quibble.

    > These images were taken from the pages of 17th, 18th and 19th century books
    > digitised by Microsoft who then generously gifted the scanned images into
    > the Public Domain.

The images were already in the public domain. Merely scanning a public-domain image is not a sufficiently transformative process to create a new work protected by copyright.

However, Microsoft was under no obligation to share the scanned images publicly, and it was generous of them to do so. But this is different to dedicating a work protected by copyright to tbe public domain, e.g. using the CC0 dedication [0]. To gift a work to the public domain, you must first hold the copyright of that work.

The distinction may seem pedantic to some, but it seems important to me.

[0] https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

ig12• 13 years ago

You seem to be mistaken in assuming that US copyright law (or more precisely the decision set down in Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp.) somehow applies to the world and not just the US.

Dylan168072• 13 years ago

Are you declaring that there are copyright doctrines more restrictive than the US? I'm very interested in hearing specifics!

AsGw• 13 years ago

This is wonderful. 17th/18th/19th century images notwithstanding, some of these are quite beautiful.

It's good that they put it up on the internet, apart from just the exposure (someone sitting half a world away seeing them), but also they could be used by someone now.

andrevan• 13 years ago

Suggestion: 3D scan and release as open source 3d models of everything in the British Museum as well.

plicense• 13 years ago

How big is the entire collection?

leke• 13 years ago

How do you filter a search in flickr to only search this library?

rsiqueira• 13 years ago

I'm also trying to do a search in this library and had no success. Not even using Google image search. The collection is useless if one can not search for images inside. It's not pratical to browse through millions of images to find one. If there is any way to search for keywords in the collection please tell me.

British Library has released over a million images onto Flickr Commons

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