America's library brings you America's favorite pastime, with a recent pilot project between the Library of Congress and Flickr, the popular photo-sharing site that this year launched The Commons on Flickr.
From the Library of Congress' Prints & Photographs Division 14 million item photo collection, 3,000 images with no known copyright restrictions were chosen from their 2 most popular collections and digitized & added to Flickr. Images from this pilot project range from 1910 Baines News Service items to the 1940s, and include a rich baseball collection with Cleveland images. (On the Library of Congress' Flickr account, search baseball in the upper right search box.)
At a library conference in California this month, George Oates from Flickr talked about the pilot project & how the Library of Congress wanted to increase access to their public collections and to provide a way for the general public to contribute to knowledge. She reminded attendees that Flickr's community actions "can gather context and bring it back to the catalog" saying that "librarians have a long history of asking patrons" and that Flickr tags can add context to the knowledge that is already present in catalogs.
Only a single "tag" (Library of Congress) was added to each photo, and Oates and LOC staff were interested in how the community would react—and contribute. She showed time-stamped screenshots:
- in the 1st hour, the primary tag display was still "Library of Congress"...
- within 24 hours, 11,000 tags had been added...
- within 48 hours, 20,000 tags had been added
"Tags & comments increase the scale of feedback a library can get," said Oates, and LOC staff increased access & service due to an early tag when LOC staffers were able to reply to a comment with "we also have a film on that." Read more about "My Friend Flickr: A Match Made in Photo Heaven," on the Library of Congress' blog.
Oates said that Flickr's next image projects are a current one with the Powerhouse Museum in Syndey, Australia and "we're also talking with the New York Public Library, and with Brewster Kale (The Internet Archive)."
