The British Library Just Released 1 Million Fascinating Old Photos To The Public

British Public LibraryThis illustration shows children playing around Father Christmas and was published in London in 1894.Five years ago, the British Library embarked on a mission with Microsoft to digitize hundreds of thousands of photos taken from centuries-old books.

Maps, illustrations, photographs, diagrams, and more; the Library was able to upload more than one million of these images to Flickr's Community Commons, reports Ars Technica.

Since they first went public on Friday, they have received 6.1 million views.

Now The British Library is asking for help. The Library knows very little about each image; mostly just which book the image came from. While some images have useful titles, many do not. The majority of the images are currently uncatalogued.

Next year, the Library plans to launch a crowdsourced application to fill the gap and allow users to describe the images themselves.

You can see all of the images on The British Library's Flickr.