January 16th, 2008
Library of Congress, Flickr launch public photo project
The Library of Congress is launching a Flickr experiment and is encouraging people to tag images. Library communications director Matt Raymond blogs about the project:
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 ….
So far the LOC is putting 3,000 images on Flickr, images with no known copyright restrictions. But the library is really excited about mob tagging (does that seem a little 2001? Well, government moves slowly.)
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.
Flickr has created a new “publication model” for publicly held photographic collections called The Commons.
But is this little experiment really going to work? What we know from Flickr is that people will tag when they have a personal interest in tagging. Will they tag as a public service? Or is there some personal interest in having public photos properly tagged?
