Just Have to Share - The British Library Public Domain Images

The British Library have posted in excess of a million copyright-free images to its Flickr photostream. The images come from the Mechanical Curator, a British Library project to scan more than 65,000 books from the 16th to 19th centuries. 

“The release of these collections into the public domain represent the Library’s desire to improve knowledge of and about them, to enable novel and unexpected ways of using them, and to begin working with researchers to explore and interpret large-scale digital collections.” British Library

The collection ranges from decorative borders and advertising ephemera and includes a manual on how to identify cattle from the rear. Most images are drawings but early photographs are also included.

Mechanical Curator

Flickr photostream