Historical Image Sets on Flickr

It seems like every other month, someone releases a large set of images into the public domain! These efforts often get great publicity and word of mouth, and it is interesting to see the activity that springs up around these collections.

Here is a recent Washington Post article about efforts to pull out images from books digitized by the Internet Archive and share them on Flickr.

There's also a BBC News article about the project.

You can browse through the Internet Archive book images at the Flickr page.

The British Library has also released a large set of images from books on Flickr. You can take a look at the favorites page to see ways that users have remixed these images. These photos were also used as the basis for an art exhibit at Burning Man.

You can play metadata games with the collections of portraits and naval images from the British Library.

Flickr Commons launched with a pilot project from the Library of Congress. Crowdsourced comments from users have helped the Library of Congress get more useful information about many images. You can check out a set of images with crowdsourced comments here.