14 million historic images collected from over half a millennium's worth of books are currently making their way, million-by-million, onto the Flickr Commons courtesy of a man named Kalev Leetaru and an organization called The Internet Archive.
The controversy surrounding the monkey selfies above, which were taken by an endangered crested black macaque using photographer David Slater's equipment, is heating up once again as Wikipedia parent Wikimedia refuses to remove the photo from its commons library, claiming that Slater does not own the copyright.
About a month ago, we shared the news that the George Eastman House had become the first photo museum to join the Google Art Project -- essentially making their archive of over 400,000 photos and negatives available for your browsing pleasure online.
Along those same lines, another collection of over 20,000 "rare and significant materials" is being brought to the World Wide Web. Launched earlier today, the Balboa Park Commons is an online archive that brings together over 20,000 digitized materials from seven different San Diego museums.
If you're interested in donating your images to the public at large, Wikimedia Commons just made it that much easier. For a while now, their online media archive has brought together a huge library of free-to-use content under one roof; and because images uploaded to Commons must be licensed as public domain, GFDL, CC attribution, or CC attribution/share alike, everything is free to use and/or share.
Now Commons is releasing a new app (formerly only available in beta) that will allow users to upload photos to the Commons archive right from their phone and, it's their hope, encourage more people to contribute "high quality educational photos."