BBC News: An American academic is creating a searchable database of 12 million historical copyright-free images. Kalev Leetaru has already uploaded 2.6 million pictures to Flickr, which are searchable thanks to tags that have been automatically added. The photos and drawings are sourced from more than 600 million library book pages scanned in by the Internet Archive organization.
this is a valuable resource. good that someone is thinking about backing all this up. it would be a shame to lose tons of historical images in a natural disaster or something.