Delightful Finds From the Internet Archive of Book Images

There’s a new Flickr account called Internet Archive Book Images. These are public domain images from books that have been digitized for posterity.

A Yahoo research fellow at Georgetown University, Kalev Leetaru, extracted over 14 million images from 2 million Internet Archive public domain eBooks that span over 500 years of content. Because we have OCR’d the books, we have now been able to attach about 500 words before and after each image. This means you can now see, click and read about each image in the collection. Think full-text search of images!

So far, there are about 2.6 million images to browse, with more being added every day. That sounds like a lot to take in, but the account is searchable. I thought it would be fun to enter some search terms to see what comes up, so I did just that and posted the most intriguing results at mental_floss.