The Biodiversity Heritage Library

The Biodiversity Heritage Library has made a huge stock of archival illustrations and imagery available on Flickr, as Josh Jones mentions in Open Culture:

The first stream, currently at 122,281 images, has been carefully curated, and includes searchable galleries and albums divided by book title or subject, such as “Exotic botany illustrated,” “The Birds of Australia v.1,” and “Bats!” The second stream, consisting of over 2 million images, is a massive grab-bag of photos, illlustrations from nature, advertisements, and imaginative renderings.

These images look like perfect stock photography for a whole range of uses and I can see using them as the basis of a talk’s slideshow or an essay.