SF Images on the Mechanical Curator

I attended a British Library event in Edinburgh recently where I learned more about the activities of their Labs initiative, which is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Launched in 2013, BL Labs helps researchers develop new ways of working with collections content and data. In practice, this work ranges from making digitised collections more accessible, to facilitating the use of text analysis software and spatial mapping tools.

So, on to the SF part of the story. Many people who encounter BL Labs will have done so (perhaps without knowing it) through the images taken from its ‘Mechanical Curator’ project. This is a program that BL Labs created to extract images from 65,000 of the digitised books in the Library's collection. In 2013, as a result of this process, a million images were uploaded to Flickr Commons under the CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication, which means that anyone can copy, modify and distribute them, even for commercial purposes, without needing permission. The collection includes cartoons, architecture, adverts and decorative art, among other things. But there's also a Space and SF album, made up of astronomical and speculative space imagery (see example below).

Image taken from page 84 of La fregate l'Incomprise. Voyage autour du monde à la plume par Sahib.

These reminded me of illustrations from some of the Special Collections volumes included in the the Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery’s exhibition ‘Visions of the Future’ (4 April - 11 June 2011) (see below).

Albert Robida Le Vingtième Siècle

Albert Robida Voyages Très Extraordinaires

For those who prefer chance encounters, there's also the Mechanical Curator tumblr page, which automatically publishes a randomly selected image from the collection every hour. And the public domain mark on the images has led to some interesting cases of creative re-use. Notable examples include artist Mario Klingemann's series of artworks using the images and the music video design for the song 'Hey There Young Sailor' by The Impatient Sisters.