hello and ~ The Internet Archive does it again, hooray!
in journal
hi there ~ i know, gone for a while, and now something a bit different, mainly in that it is capitalized properly. 
hope your summer was excellent and hope to post an update on life oh life soon, but in short: all is good, and in fact, perhaps great. happy september. ~ andrea
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Through the advantages of OCR (optical character recognition), and thanks to organizations like the Internet Archive and digitization projects at countless library and academic institutions worldwide, we now have digital access to more books than the average person could ever have had not that long ago. However, the emphasis has been on the printed word for the most part – until now.
According to a BBC article, an expert at big data and the Yahoo! fellow at Georgetown University, Kalev Leetaru has uploaded so far over 2.6 million copyright-free photos and drawings to Flickr (owned by Yahoo!) as part of a project that pulls the images from over 2 million books found in the Internet Archive. The earliest images date back to 1500, and the latest ones up to 1922, due to copyright reasons, with the plan being to upload over 10 million more images. To get those images, Leetaru wrote a program that searches the Internet Archive’s publicly-accessible files for images and then extracts them, as well as pulling out metadata info such as title, creator, tags, and the preceding and following text that surrounded the images. This makes the images searchable, such as “stars” or London” – and once an image captures the searcher’s interest, they can find a link to the original text available in its entirety at the Internet Archive.
Hoping to finish the project by the end of next year, Leetaru told the BBC,
“What I want to see is… Wikipedia have a national day of going through this to illustrate Wikipedia articles…Take a random page about a historical event and there’s probably a good chance that you’re going to find an image in here that bears in some way on that event or location….Being able to basically enrich [them] would be huge.”
Check out the Flickr stream here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages.
More info:
‘Millions of historic images posted to Flickr’ http://blog.archive.org/2014/08/29/millions-of-historic-images-posted-to-flickr/
‘Welcome the Internet Archive to The Commons’ http://blog.flickr.net/en/2014/08/29/welcome-the-internet-archive-to-the-commons/
‘Millions of historical images posted to Flickr’ http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28976849
‘Time travel through millions of historic Open Library images’ http://blog.openlibrary.org/2014/08/29/time-travel-through-millions-of-historic-open-library-images
From Prodigiorvm ac ostentorvm chronicon(1557)
From The Call of the Stars (1919)
<img src=”http://mellowtrouble.net/images/7.jpg” alt=”From 1908’s Children and Gardens/>
From Children and Gardens (1908)
