The Library of Congress has over a million historic images in its online catalog.
Launched in 2004, Flickr is the first social photo sharing service developed using "web 2.0" technology, with comment features, interest groups and tagging to create a rich collection of images and an engaged community of users.
In what may turn into one of the most interesting and useful applications of social technology, Flickr and the Library of Congress are partnering to put photos from the LoC's collection online in a social environment and users to interact with them. (ReadWriteWeb)
A tag is a key word or label attached to a photo, web page, blog post, video or other web-based information. Folksonomy "is the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate content." (wikipedia)
As part of the pilot program with the Library of Congress, Flickr has launched a new tagging initiative called The Commons. The Commons encourages people to help describe the historical photos being added to Flickr by institutions like the Library of Congress by tagging them or commenting on them. (ReadWriteWeb)
This means that we can each organize the photos with tags that make sense to us, attach relevant information and add personal perspectives. These folksonomies and comments have the potential to deepen the meaning of the images and create new contexts and narratives for them.
It offers an opportunity for people to discover and participate in conversations about history and culture. It also risks silly, meaningless or false annotations. It's an experiment with precedents like Wikipedia and OhMyNews.
"From the Library's perspective, this pilot project is a statement about the power of the Web and user communities to help people better acquire information, knowledge and -- most importantly -- wisdom," said Matt Raymond, the LoC's blogger-in-chief. "One of our goals, frankly, is to learn as much as we can about that power simply through the process of making constructive use of it." (ReadWriteWeb)
Some tips on on how to explore the archive:
The photos are organized into two sets - or albums) - 1930s-40s in Color and News in the 1910s.
Try browsing the most popular tags for all the photos. If you go a little deeper you can find less frequently used tags like vintagehair or trackandfield.
I particularly like Jack Delano's photos from the Farm Security Administration set.
Try clicking on a tag link like this:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/tags/food/
When you're ready to look at a new tag, if you know what you're interested in viewing you can put your cursor in the address bar of your browser and simply change "food" to another tag - such as "railroad", below: http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/tags/railroad/.
As you explore the Library of Congress archives, use the opportunity to explore the features of a well-designed social media site. Frankly, there other photo sharing services which take less time to learn, but none offer the features and level of community engagement of Flickr. For more help, start here.
If you're so inclined, participate in The Commons. The LoC has said that it plans to keep the photos on Flickr as long as there's activity and interest. Flickr hopes this pilot can be used as a model that other cultural institutions would pick up, to share and redistribute the myriad collections held by cultural heritage institutions all over the world. So add your own tags and comments. The more thoughtful people who help flesh out these archives, the better the results of the experiment.
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