The Public Domain Review shared that the links to the now thousands of saved images lead to a “Page Not Found” announcement. The curation and invaluable metadata - favorites, tags, and comments that artists, historians, and other old book-enjoyers had contributed - was gone.
Couldn’t you, say, add a button so people uninterested in book scans could filter them out? And why hadn’t there been any warning? 3) The book images tended to show up in irrelevant search results of Flickr Commons photography.”īut users didn’t quite understand why the account had to be deleted from Flickr entirely instead of altered to deal with the problems. “Flickr and Internet Archive were in agreement on this because: 1) The account was largely comprised of scans of book images, not photos 2) The account was no longer being actively managed by Internet Archive. On the forum, a Flickr staff member confirmed the deletion:
On a Flickr forum, fans of the Internet Archive Book Images account called the loss an unfathomable “destruction of knowledge.” One user wrote: the deletion “really impacted my life,” while another wrote “to find all these golden needles in the same haystack a second time again seems impossible.” The deletion was swift and quiet, but users soon noticed. before 1926 is in the public domain, and just because a book has been collecting dust for a few centuries, doesn’t mean it’s boring.īut a few weeks ago, poof! The account disappeared. The crowdsourced metadata allowed users to effectively search for the items they wanted - it’s far more efficient to search a keyword than to sift through pages, and pages, of scans.įrom century-old fairy tales to tomes about falling in love via telegraph wires, old books provide both archival value and endless entertainment. Its repository of quirky vintage illustrations, fascinating preserved posters, and old books numbers over 5 million and users created personal galleries and added tags. The Internet Archive’s Book Images account on Flickr started in 2014, and in its seven and a half years, it’s been a time portal to the past.
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