If you don't already know, there was a project to extract all the illustrations from book scans in the Internet Archive and they were uploaded to and could be explored on Flickr.
It was probably one of my favourite things on the internet, no hyperbole. You could search for words and you would get all sorts of strange illustrations/block prints/photos that may or may not have something to do with the term. The fact that the illustrations were taken out of context made them even more fascinating and mysterious.
And now it's gone..
All the time people had spent delving the depths of the archive of 5+ million images and curating the most interesting images, just gone?
I really really hope that some backup of the metadata was done before the delete button was pushed.. but I fear the worst. From the sounds of it the account was voluntarily deleted by IA. I find it hard to believe that they of all people would just nuke that information?
What makes it all the more painful is I'd actually done a full scrape of all the metadata that Flickr makes available through its API, but I can't seem to find the data from the scrape that I did that included the all important view counts..
The full scrape you did — is it something you can share? I'm wondering if there's some way to use it to... idunno, do something. Worst case, maybe it could be used to create a search engine that could find the metadata for a given URL of an image that was on the account.
If we can't get Flickr to undo this, I'm trying to think of other places that might be able to host the data (would need the images, too, though), and already have the necessary software for an image collection that big. Thoughts?
At least from my perspective, this thoughtless act has decimated the usefulness of the Archive book collection, because all my interaction with it was through the images inside the books.
It was probably one of my favourite things on the internet, no hyperbole. You could search for words and you would get all sorts of strange illustrations/block prints/photos that may or may not have something to do with the term. The fact that the illustrations were taken out of context made them even more fascinating and mysterious.
And now it's gone..
All the time people had spent delving the depths of the archive of 5+ million images and curating the most interesting images, just gone?
I really really hope that some backup of the metadata was done before the delete button was pushed.. but I fear the worst. From the sounds of it the account was voluntarily deleted by IA. I find it hard to believe that they of all people would just nuke that information?
What makes it all the more painful is I'd actually done a full scrape of all the metadata that Flickr makes available through its API, but I can't seem to find the data from the scrape that I did that included the all important view counts..
http://web.archive.org/web/20220308103246/https://www.flickr...