The Library of Congress has a blog. Not only do they have a blog, but actual useful information is posted on it on a regular basis! Amazing!
The latest announcement is that they have added 3,000 images to Flickr, the photo-sharing site. In My Friend Flickr: A Match Made in Photo Heaven, they explain:
“…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.”
Here’s the beauty of this – not only will these images be more available, the global community of viewers can give back to the project by tagging and commenting on the images. In a sense, the Library of Congress is allowing the whole world to be guardians of our shared photographic history.
They are starting small, only 3,000 out of their collection of 14 million prints. But these are from some of the most popular collections and are completely without copyright restriction. It’s a start.
Hopefully they will add more content soon, because even though 3,000 sounds like a lot, you always need a lot of content to make people feel like they will find what they are looking for with one visit. It’s hard to run a limited “pilot test” with things like this, because if the problem is not enough content, that’s the one thing you won’t find out.
Sylvia