Natural History Images from the Biodiversity Heritage Library

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The Biodiversity Heritage Library is a consortium of libraries that are digitizing materials pertaining to biodiversity within their collections. While the majority of the digital collection contains text and scientific literature, the books and historic journals and albums the BHL is digitizing often contain high quality natural history images.

The BHL is pulling the images from their digital library and hosting them online in Flickr, with minimal metadata in the Flickr record and a link back to the official record in the BHL digital library for a full catalog record. There are more than 1,600 sets of images in the BHL’s Flickr collection, making it a fantastically rich resource for natural history images in the public domain.

For more information, check out the BHL Flickr page!

Image from Flore médicale /. Paris: Imprimerie de C.L.F. Panckoucke, 1828-1832.

Medieval Plant Survey

The Medieval Plant Survey is a crowd-sourced medieval herbiary. With help from Flickr, it pairs contemporary photographs of plants with medieval manuscript illustrations to create a collaborative reference resource. For more information about the project, click here.

Islamic Manuscripts of the Walters Art Museum

With the help of a Preservation and Access Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and with additional funding from an anonymous donor, the Walters has completed its program to create digital surrogates of its collection of Islamic manuscripts and single leaves. Images are free for any noncommercial use, provided you follow the terms of the Creative Commons license specified by the museum.

Images of the manuscript are available for download from Flickr, including high-resolution images. Full manuscript PDFs (including data) are also available on the Walters website (see the above example here).

Images of Colonial Africa Digitized by the National Archives

The National Archives has digitised thousands of unique images of Africa and published them on Flickr this week. The collection spans more than 100 years of African history, from as early as the 1860s, including images of people, places, national and imperial events, conflict and natural disasters.

As some of the images have minimal context, the public is invited to contribute to these historical assets by adding comments and captions, filling in knowledge gaps.

The collection is available in Flickr. Via National Archives News.

History of the Book Photostream on Flickr

The Chair of the History of the Book at the University of Amsterdam has created a Flickr photostream, including typographical material with a focus on the Netherlands from 1470-1800. The collection is a work in progress, created in collaboration with Special Collections, Amsterdam, and also with the Royal Library, The Hague and the Archive at Alkmaar. Over the coming year, project collaborators hope to extend the collection to more than 20,000 photographs of initials, ornaments and type. Descriptions to facilitate searching will also be enhanced through the use of the Iconclass database.

National Archives Joins Flickr Commons

The National Archives and Records Administration is now a member of Flickr Commons, a website for cultural institutions to share their photograph collections with the public. The National Archives joins the New York Public Library, the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress and many other archives, libraries and museums in sharing their collections with Flickr. Visit NARA’s photostream by clicking here.

To mark the opening of its photostream in the Commons on February 4, 2010, the National Archives has posted a new photo set containing more than two hundred photographs of the American West by renowned American photographer Ansel Adams.

Images of the Staffordshire Hoard on Flickr

The Staffordshire Hoard, discovered in July 2009, is the largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold ever found. Leslie Webster, former Keeper of Prehistory and Europe at the British Museum describes this discovery:

…this is going to alter our perceptions of Anglo-Saxon England in the seventh and early eighth century as radically, if not moreso, as the 1939 Sutton Hoo discoveries did; it will make historians and literary scholars review what their sources tell us, and archaeologists and art-historians rethink the chronology of metalwork and manuscripts; and it will make us all think again about rising (and failing) kingdoms and the expression of regional identities in this period, the complicated transition from paganism to Christianity, the conduct of battle and the nature of fine metalwork production – to name only a few of the many huge issues it raises.

A selection of quality Staffordshire Hoard images is available on Flickr. To download high resolution images for projection, choose a thumbnail and then click on the “all sizes” button above the image.