The Library of Congress has just uploaded over 3000 images from their collection that have no known copyright restrictions to Flickr. The announcement today on the Library’s blog says:

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.

The flickr folks are calling this a pilot for a new program, The Commons, with the stated goal of making the collections of public images more available as well as expanding the body of knowledge about the collections. It’s a fantastic start to a potentially amazing project.

See the crowdsourcing at work on The Library of Congress’ flickr album, which is already buzzing with activity.

I was thrilled to quickly find some fantastic photos of a sideshow at the 1941 Vermont State Fair. Kudos to the librarians!

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at 9:59 pm and is filed under Mike's Rants, New Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.