Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #savethebookimages
Most recents (1)
1) @Flickr has deleted the Internet Archive Book Images account, effectively removing 5,249,938 searchable @internetarchive book images from every single gallery they were part of, destroying all the added data from comments and tagging done by users over many years.
2) The reasoning seems to be that The Commons is mostly intended for photos, so the book scans didn't really belong, and the account wasn't being maintained: flickr.com/help/forum/721… No warning appears to have been given and there doesn't seem to be a backup of the data available.
3) The sheer immensity of this loss of data is devastating, and I'm still trying to wrap my head around it. To my knowledge, there is now no way to search for individual images from the hundreds of thousands of books at archive.org.
