viz.

The Library of Congress has created its own Flickr homepage and posted 3,000 public-domain photos to the site. This first collection of the LOC’s 14 million images is part of a pilot project called “The Commons.” The images are labeled with the photographer’s name and short descriptions, but the LOC is relying on Flickr’s users to provide tags for the images.

This is a fantastic idea. Not only is it great for the public, who will have easier access to these images, it should be great for the LOC, who are offloading to resource-intensive tasks—cataloguing and hosting the images—to a service that will do them both for free.

In the first case, the ease of use and popularity of Flickr can only be an improvement on the LOC’s previous efforts to post their images. A few months ago I played around with the LOC American Memory Project site while I was researching a post on visual resources for teaching Border Studies. This site isn’t nearly as full-featured or easy to navigate as Flickr, so moving the images to that service can only make them more accessible.

As for the second point, I’m sure it would be ideal for librarians to to do all of the tagging of these photos, but, having provided the catalogue information, I think this job could be easily completed by volunteers at Flickr. Additionally, while notices have primarily focused on the ability of users to tag these photos, what about Flickr’s other features, like locating the images on a map? In short, I think the accessibility and informational benefits that Flickr provides are going to greatly increase the value of these images to both the LOC and everyone else.

This is a great move by the LOC. Hopefully, other government agencies will follow their lead. (Over at Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow has posted some analysis by “Rogue archivist” Carl Malamud, who argues that the Smithsonian should follow the LOC’s lead and get Flickr to host their images a well.)