Hi Lars,
The original scans are large single-page TIFFs (or JP2? not immediately sure) from which these files were extracted - as you've noticed, they're not taken from the PDFs.
The master images aren't available online, but I believe this is more for reasons of scale and size than from a desire to keep them protected - I know they've been made available to on-site researchers without any restrictions. You'd be best off contacting the BL team if you want access to the originals.
For other items from the same book, use the imagesfrombook tag:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/tags/imagesfrombook000507311/
Andrew.
On 20 December 2013 19:50, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
On 12/15/2013 05:08 PM, Emilio J. RodrÃguez-Posada wrote:
Quote from full announcement http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/2013/12/a-million-fi...
We have released over a million images <http://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary> onto Flickr Commons for anyone to use, remix and repurpose. These images were taken from the pages of 17th, 18th and 19th century books digitised by Microsoft
Flickr account http://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary Example of image http://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/11307195524/ Example of all images from a book http://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/tags/sysnum002660292 Stuff for coders https://github.com/BL-Labs/imagedirectory
I found an illustration from a Swedish book, found it in the catalog of the British Library, and from there I could both download a PDF and view the whole book in an online 'item viewer'.
However, the downloaded PDF has a much lower resolution (I estimate it at 150 dpi) than the real scans (which I estimate at 300 dpi). The illustrations on Flickr are in full resolution.
Has anybody found out how to download the whole book in full resolution? The 'item viewer' appears to be a Javascript zoom and pan interface based on layers of 'tiles' (similar to OpenStreetMap), scaled and cut from the scanned images.
I had the same problem with books scanned by the Norwegian national library, but there I was able to figure out how to download images in full resolution by requesting large tiles at full zoom. The URLs used by the British Library are opaque to me.
Here is the illustration found on Flickr, http://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/11067189413/
The description there says 'page 331 of Elfsyssel', Identifier: 000507311, an easily identifiable book.
How can I search Flickr for other 'Elfsyssel' pictures? This search yields nothing, http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=elfsyssel
The library catalog record is found here, http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?mode=Basic&vi...
After I downloaded the PDF, I made the book available for reading and proofreading here, http://runeberg.org/elfsyssel/
The illustration (on "page 331") is here, http://runeberg.org/elfsyssel/0331.html but even if you select "full resolution" there, you only get the image from the PDF, and not the good picture from Flickr.
-- Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se) Project Runeberg - free Nordic literature - http://runeberg.org/
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