Its been just under a year since GDELT creator Kalev Leetaru collaborated with the Internet Archive and Flickr to extract the images from 600 million digitized book pages dating back 500 years from over 1,000 libraries worldwide to make them all browseable and searchable. For a cool search, try searching for "building" in the Flickr collection to search 500 years of illustrations of manmade structures across the world!
As a tribute to the collection, we offer you this early prototype visualization that was created in late December 2013 and early 2014 that selected one image from all the digitized books for each year 1500 to 2015 and created a single high resolution montage showcasing 500 years of the imagery of books in a single image. The montage starts in the upper left with the year 1500 and running sequentially by row. Under each image is a caption with the year and the Internet Archive identifier for the book the image came from.
Enjoy!