Brightsolid is a Dundee-based company that has digitised quite a bit of British library material as a sort of public-private partnership. For example, the British Newspaper Archive - http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/

I'm of two minds as to whether this has been a good thing. On one hand it's digitised content that was previously only in paper form, but on the other that content is now charged for, and likely will remain so for a long time due to contracts. Effectively it has been put back into copyright.

Flickr is a perfectly reasonable tool for the job.