There are a lot of talented Brits in the Bay Area, but there are also many great UK based programmers and companies in the UK who could have developed a home-grown solution. This is embarrassing on many levels.
Most taxpayers, even if they agree with you, are likely to be more worried by the prospect of the British Library developing its own tools for access to its digital collections when perfectly adequately ones already exist.
By leveraging Flickr, the library frees itself of the problems of dealing with tens of millions of users attempting to access its material. Memory institutions have centuries of experience dealing with the lone, dedicated researcher. They're less used to dealing with massive number of researchers accessing collections at the same time.
We already have an open and free technology for that: Bittorrent.
Why shouldn't they? It's to everyone's benefit for these to be as widely distributed as reasonably possible.
> There are a lot of talented Brits in the Bay Area, but there are also many great UK based programmers and companies in the UK who could have developed a home-grown solution.
These folks can now use the Flickr API to download each and every one of the photos and code to their hearts' content.
Because Flickr could one day be shut down, and eventually will be, however far on the future that may be. For resources like this such a disruption will be painful.
I'm not saying it is a bad idea, only that I understand the long-term hesitation in this.
Would that have been more cost effective?
That said, seeing how the images are creative commons licensed, it would still make sense to put them on flickr, too :P The more, the merrier.
Several major museums and libraries (including the US's National Archives) have donated major collections.
I'm of two minds as to whether this has been a good thing. On one hand it's digitised content that was previously only in paper form, but on the other that content is now charged for, and likely will remain so for a long time due to contracts. Effectively it has been put back into copyright.
Flickr is a perfectly reasonable tool for the job.
I'm not sure it's really an appropriate place for entrepreneurs unless they are interested in accessing or using the books somehow. When all the other libraries have shut down or turned into Internet access centers, this one will still be valuable as a repository of the books we choose to keep as physical artefacts.
> These images were taken from the pages of 17th, 18th and 19th century books
> digitised by Microsoft who then generously gifted the scanned images into
> the Public Domain.
However, Microsoft was under no obligation to share the scanned images publicly, and it was generous of them to do so. But this is different to dedicating a work protected by copyright to tbe public domain, e.g. using the CC0 dedication [0]. To gift a work to the public domain, you must first hold the copyright of that work.
The distinction may seem pedantic to some, but it seems important to me.
> 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. The data from this will be as openly licensed as is sensible (given the nature of crowdsourcing) and the code, as always, will be under an open licence.
That said, I am very pleased to read the other reply that mentioned their plans. I'm not waiting, though. I'm very excited to dive in immediately.
It's good that they put it up on the internet, apart from just the exposure (someone sitting half a world away seeing them), but also they could be used by someone now.