The British Library is the largest library collection in the world, with more than 170 million items in its catalog. Interestingly, though, only 14 million of these are books. Among the manuscripts, journals, newspapers, magazines, sound and video recordings, and so much more, there are prints and drawings. In an effort to make some of its collection more accessible, it has placed over million license-free illustrations on the web. Mental Floss brought this news to us in their article, “The British Library Has Released A Million Free Images.”
In making these images available, the British Library is asking the public’s help in tagging and identifying the content. This crowdsourcing is perhaps the best approach for organizing the huge number of images and related content.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
