Back in July last year I had an idea. I had been interested for many years in eyewitness accounts of people’s experiences of cinema-going. I’d collected a lot of these while researching the early years of cinema in London, treasuring the special quality they had for making history come to life in all its untidy,Read More
Seasonal greetings from The Demon McGuire, a poem published (anonymously) in Sydney in 1885, with some fantastical illustrations and a Christmassy theme. Just one of the million or so free-to-use images from the British Library’s Flickr pages. A merry Christmas to all!
Following the release of one million free-to-use images from the British Library, extracted automatically from digitised copies of nineteenth century, there has been an astonishing reaction worldwide. Well over 50 million visits have been made top the British Library’s Flickr pages, and more than just visiting people have been identifying, tagging, blogging and sharing thoseRead More
A few months ago, the British Library launched the Mechanical Curator. This was a tool built out of the BL Labs project, which automatically extracted images from 65,000 or so out-of-copyright 19th century books which Microsoft had digitised for the Library backs in the days when it thought it might compete with Google in theRead More