This is fantastic, but I do have one small quibble.

    > These images were taken from the pages of 17th, 18th and 19th century books
    > digitised by Microsoft who then generously gifted the scanned images into
    > the Public Domain.
    

However, Microsoft was under no obligation to share the scanned images publicly, and it was generous of them to do so. But this is different to dedicating a work protected by copyright to tbe public domain, e.g. using the CC0 dedication [0]. To gift a work to the public domain, you must first hold the copyright of that work.

The distinction may seem pedantic to some, but it seems important to me.

[0] https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

For any HN'ers based in London the British Library in St Pancras is a fantastic resource, and their Business and IP Centre ( http://www.bl.uk/bipc/ ) has an easy signup for a Readers Pass for entrepreneurs.

Great, but why should the British Library, a non-profit charity and UK taxpayer assisted institution put these images on the servers of a US based for-profit company?

There are a lot of talented Brits in the Bay Area, but there are also many great UK based programmers and companies in the UK who could have developed a home-grown solution. This is embarrassing on many levels.

This is a great initiative but as long as these images aren't reasonably tagged they'll remain undiscovered.

Suggestion: 3D scan and release as open source 3d models of everything in the British Museum as well.

This is wonderful. 17th/18th/19th century images notwithstanding, some of these are quite beautiful.

It's good that they put it up on the internet, apart from just the exposure (someone sitting half a world away seeing them), but also they could be used by someone now.

How do you filter a search in flickr to only search this library?

How big is the entire collection?