As you’ll read below the technology to prepare and upload these images to Flickr is is the work of one person. Impressive!!! Of course, credit also to the Internet Archive for digitizing the books and making them accessible to all.
From the BBC:
An American academic is creating a searchable database of 12 million historic copyright-free images.
Kalev Leetaru has already uploaded 2.6 million pictures to Flickr, which are searchable thanks to tags that have been automatically added.
The photos and drawings are sourced from more than 600 million library book pages scanned in by the Internet Archive organisation.
Mr Leetaru began work on the project while researching communications technology at Georgetown University in Washington DC as part of a fellowship sponsored by Yahoo, the owner of photo-sharing service Flickr.
To achieve his goal, Mr Leetaru wrote his own software to work around the way the books had originally been digitised.
As part of the process, the software recognised which parts of a page were pictures in order to discard them.
Mr Leetaru’s code used this information to go back to the original scans, extract the regions the OCR program had ignored, and then save each one as a separate file in the Jpeg picture format.
The software also copied the caption for each image and the text from the paragraphs immediately preceding and following it in the book.
Direct to Internet Archive Book Images
On a related note, last December we posted about an online collection from the British Library of more than one million images taken from digitized books first published in the 17th, 18th and 19th century books