The British Library (BL) has released over one million images from 17th, 18th, and 19th century books on Flickr. Equally important, the images and metadata have been released into the public domain. While the metadata is currently limited, BL plans to release a crowdsourcing application next year that will build on human-provided descriptions to facilitate automated metadata creation. Although the images and data are available for use and reuse without restriction, BL is following an increasingly common trend among GLAM institutions where attribution is requested (rather than required), or, what Dan Cohen calls CC0 (+BY).
