The Flickr website has joined with the Library of Congress in a pilot program to post 3,000 (of its 14 million) archival photographs on the internet. These pictures contain an incredible amount of history and graphically show how different our country is today as compared to the first half of the 1900s.
From the Flickr website:
Back in June of 2007, we began our first collaboration with a civic
institution to facilitate giving people a voice in describing the
content of a publicly-held photography collection.
The key goals of this pilot project are to firstly give you a taste
of the hidden treasures in the huge Library of Congress collection, and
secondly to show how your input of a tag or two can make the collection
even richer.
You're invited to help describe photographs in the Library of Congress' collection on Flickr, by adding tags or leaving comments
___________________________________
and from the Library of Congress blog:
My Friend Flickr: A Match Made in Photo Heaven
Posted on: January 16th, 2008 by Matt Raymond
If
you’re reading this, then chances are you already know about Web 2.0.
Even if you don’t know the term itself, you’re one of millions
worldwide who are actively creating, sharing or benefiting from
user-generated content that characterizes Web 2.0 phenomena.
As a communicator, I want to expand the reach of the Library and
access to our magnificent collections as far and wide as possible. Of
course, there are only so many hours in the day, so many staff in
Library offices and so many dollars in the budget. Priorities have to
be chosen that will most effectively advance our mission.
That’s why it is so exciting to let people know about the launch of
a brand-new pilot project the Library of Congress is undertaking with Flickr,
the enormously popular photo-sharing site that has been a Web 2.0
innovator. If all goes according to plan, the project will help address
at least two major challenges: how to ensure better and better access
to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible
information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and
posterity. In many senses, we are looking to enhance our metadata (one
of those Web 2.0 buzzwords that 90 percent of our readers could
probably explain better than me).
The project is beginning somewhat modestly, but we hope to learn a
lot from it. Out of some 14 million prints, photographs and other
visual materials at the Library of Congress, more than 3,000 photos
from two of our most popular collections are being made available on
our new Flickr page, to include only images for which no copyright restrictions are known to exist.
The
real magic comes when the power of the Flickr community takes over. We
want people to tag, comment and make notes on the images, just like any
other Flickr photo, which will benefit not only the community but also
the collections themselves. For instance, many photos are missing key
caption information such as where the photo was taken and who is
pictured. If such information is collected via Flickr members, it can
potentially enhance the quality of the bibliographic records for the
images.
We’re also very excited that, as part of this pilot, Flickr has
created a new publication model for publicly held photographic
collections called “The Commons.”
Flickr hopes—as do we—that the project will eventually capture the
imagination and involvement of other public institutions, as well.
From the Library’s perspective, this pilot project is a statement
about the power of the Web and user communities to help people better
acquire information, knowledge and—most importantly—wisdom. One of our
goals, frankly, is to learn as much as we can about that power simply
through the process of making constructive use of it.
More information is available on the Library’s Web site here and on the FAQ page here.
And with that, gentlemen (and gentlewomen), start your tagging!
UPDATE: You can read Flickr’s take here.
(Image of baseball player “Bugs” Raymond from the Library’s Bain Collection because I liked the surname. Image of grain elevator from Caldwell, Idaho, from the Library’s FSA/OWI Color Photographs Collection because it helps illustrate that there are active Flickr user groups for even such diverse subjects as grain elevators.)
Children's E-Book Stories
Stories
.
All students and their parents MUST read and sign this document before
they should be allowed to create their blog for your class.
Recent Comments