Apr 05, 2022 20:00:00

5.2 million valuable book images are suddenly deleted by Flickr together with the official account of the Internet Archive and disappear

Deleted the dedicated account of 'Project to extract images from public domain ebooks and publish them for free' that Flickr, a photo sharing service, was conducting in collaboration with the

Internet Archive , an organization that records and stores all information on the Internet. Did. It seems that the information of 5.2 million images released under the name of the project has disappeared due to this deletion.

Flickr: The Help Forum: [Staff Response] Internet Archive Book Images Photostream down or deleted?
https://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/72157720510495566/

The newly deleted account is an account called 'Internet Archive Book Images' that was jointly operated by Flickr and the Internet Archive. This account is for a project to upload images extracted from public domain ebooks owned by the Internet Archive, and the registered images are all free download & commercial use from medical materials to landscape paintings. It was possible.

For this project, the article in 2014 when the project was launched will be helpful.

A project to publish 14 million free and freely available historical images --GIGAZINE

If you access the URL of the account in question ' https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/ ', you can see that the page has been deleted as shown below.

According to a post on the help forum on this case, Flickr said, '1) The account was mainly images of books, not photos.' '2) The Internet archive was not actively managing the account.' 3) Book images uploaded to the same account tended to be displayed in search results unrelated to

Flickr Commons for the purpose of protecting photos. '

Due to this deletion, the 5,249,938 images registered at the time of deletion can no longer be accessed, and all information such as tags attached to these images by the user has disappeared. In addition, Flickr has been accused of not being able to properly store information because it carried out this deletion without prior notice.

George Oates, the founder of Flickr Commons and the next board member of the Flickr Foundation, officially apologized, 'This deletion was a mistake,' after receiving numerous inquiries about the series of events. We have announced that we will work with the Internet Archive to restore the uploaded images as much as possible, remove them from project control, and reconfigure them as CC0 licenses.

'As inquiries received, removing material from Digital Commons should not be done without a very careful plan. We didn't plan well and we made it known. I didn't do that either. Following this failure, I was reminded that better decisions and procedures are needed on how to handle Flickr Commons membership and program participation in the future. The Flickr Foundation and the entire Flickr team will work to strengthen governance and consensus with a view to long-term prosperity. '