MANILA, Philippines – The British Library is following Getty Museum’s lead in releasing images into the public domain.

The British Library has released 1 million images onto Flickr Commons (view the album here) for “anyone to use, remix, and repurpose,” while the Getty Museum released 4,600 images back in August.

The images shared by the British Library come from 17th, 18th and 19th century books and were digitized by Microsoft.

The million-image-strong push wants to make finding, navigating, and displaying the illustrations easier.

Aside from some basic organizational tags set up on Flickr Commons, the British Library plans to release an application for crowdsourcing descriptions of the images released.

The sharing of media as part of public domain is gaining popularity as a result of various online initiatives. – Rappler.com