[Wikimedia-l] The British Library releases 1 million images

[Jens Best]

Thanks for the news.

A question comes to my mind when I read this article: Why did the British
Library use Flickr instead of Wikimedia Commons? Maybe it has to do
something with a better usability of Flickr? -

The usability of Wikimedia Commons most be increased to make it more
attractive to individual and institutional users. Don't you think so?

The next steps mentioned in the article indicates good opportunities for us
to get involved and show the potential of an experienced platform for
crowdsourcing information and knowledge:

"We are looking for new, inventive ways to navigate, find and display these
'unseen illustrations'. and furtheron in the blogpost, "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."

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

Best regards,

Jens






2013/12/15 Emilio J. Rodríguez-Posada <emijrp at gmail.com>

> Quote from full announcement
>
> http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/2013/12/a-million-first-steps.html
>
> 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<
> http://pressandpolicy.bl.uk/Press-Releases/The-British-Library-19th-Century-Book-Digitisation-Project-343.aspx>who
> then generously gifted the scanned images to us, allowing us to release
> > 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 so much more that
> > even we are not aware of.
>
>
> 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
>
> So... :-)
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-- 
--
Jens Best
Präsidium
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.
web: http://www.wikimedia.de
mail: jens.best <http://goog_17221883>@wikimedia.de

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