A U.S. academic has uploaded 2.6 million images, mostly illustrations and photos from history's copyright free images, to image-sharing site Flickr that will allow users to take a digital leap back in time.

Kalev Leetaru uploaded the images from old books as part of the Internet Archive Organization's scanning process.

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According to Leetaru, internet digitalization projects have been traditionally focused on archiving written documents from the past and images are more often than not ignored.

He said the reality of all the libraries today is that they've only been digitizing the text of their books as PDFs or text searchable documents. Libraries have, therefore, been focused on text documents.

The Internet Archive Organization's project reverses this process.

The vast array of images and illustrations are sourced from more than 600 million library book pages scanned by the organization. The majority of these images are rare and are extremely difficult to source.

These rare images are not found in museums and art galleries around the world because the original copies are already lost, Leetaru said.

His aim is to upload 12 million relic images upon completion of this project called the "Internet Archive Book Images."

These images will be fully tagged. Users can search for particular images using a single search term.

They can peruse the historical evolution of people, places, societies, products and technology.

Leetaru hopes this project can revolutionize how libraries archive their books, not only by digitizing text but also including rare, relic images from history.

The Flickr account called "The Internet Archive Book Images" will consolidate a total of 12 million images from 600 million pages of old books.

The account is non-profit and acts as a digital library of websites found online and other cultural artifacts in digital form.

Like a regular library, The Internet Archive provides free access to anyone who has an online connection including researchers, scholars and historians, students and the general public.

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