This postThe Library of Congress is now on Flickr. (Thanks to NorthTemple.com for the heads-up.)
Not the whole thing, of course, but they have uploaded around 3,000 public domain images. Why? They explain:
We invite you to tag and comment on the photos, and we also welcome identifying information—many of these old photos came to us with scanty descriptions!
We are offering two sets of digitized photos: the 1,600 color images from the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information and about 1,500 images from the George Grantham Bain News Service. Why these photos? They have long been popular with visitors to the Library; they have no known restrictions on publication or distribution, and they have high resolution scans. We look forward to learning what kinds of tags and comments these images inspire.
Very, very cool. This is the kind of thing libraries and archives need to start doing — crowdsourcing. Sure, it’s not as sure-fire as doing it in-house, but let’s face it: most libraries and archives are low on budget and high on backlog. Why not open description up to the public? I don’t really see any conflict, even from the accuracy/authority viewpoint, because all you have to do is make it clear what’s “official” and what’s user-generated. Simple.
Yes, user-generated data will probably not be perfect, but that doesn’t take away from the rest of its usefulness. And yet I think librarians and archivists have often looked down their noses at ideas like this, mainly because job security starts to flicker and — in their minds — vanish. But to me, this is where it really begins. It’s exciting.
Now if I can just get my library on Flickr…
