The Internet Archive is in the process of releasing on the Flickr profile retro images from over 2 million public domain books. The book image collection is a fantastic resource of vintage pictures everyone can reuse and repurpose.
The goal is to extract 14 million photos and illustrations. Currently there are “only” 2.6 millions images available. However, searching the collection is already a big challenge.
And this is where the project developed by Mario Klingemann comes really handy. Klingemann is experimenting with computational craft. He has just released an interactive chart The Internet Archive’s map of book subjects.
The chart brings together 5,500 subjects of all the images available from The Internet Archive’s Flickr profile.
It’s not only a collection of topics. It’s not only a word cloud where the size of the word reflects the number of images that are available for the topic. Most of all, the subjects are arranged in such a way that all connected topics are linked. When you mouse over a single word, all related topics are highlighted as well.
Making the map was possible thanks to the fact that every image is tagged in The Internet Archive’s Flickr photostream. Clicking on a word in the interactive chart will open a Flickr page with photos marked with a specific tag.
If you are looking for a specific keyword, you can use your browser’s built-in search function to find all instances of the word. The picture at the top of this post shows results for the search “book”.
What I like about Mario Klingemann’s chart is that it’s a wonderful tool you can use to find ideas for new blog posts.
More about free books and images:
[ef-archive number=5 tag=”free-ebooks”]
