Subject: Folklore: Library of Congress Photos at Flickr
From:
JohnInKansas
Date: 26 Jan 08 - 05:10 AM
Flickr Helps the Library of Congress
Archivists at the Library of Congress need your help, and Flickr's, to identify these photos.
By Brian Braiker
Newsweek Web Exclusive
Updated: 6:26 PM ET Jan 24, 2008
A koan for our digital age: if a picture is worth a thousand words, what is the right word worth? The Library of Congress aims to find out. The venerable old institution has teamed up with Flickr, the popular social-networking and photo-sharing site, to create "Flickr Commons." By putting 3,115 of its archival photographs on the site, the LOC hopes Flickr's community of users will apply tags—usually one-word descriptions—to them. The photos are already online at the library's Web site, but the LOC hopes Flickr's 23 million members will tell them something about the images they don't already know. "It's akin to bringing the mountain to Muhammad," says Matt Raymond, the LOC's director of communications. "It's an excellent way to use the technology."
If giving the unwashed masses the power to tag (effectively index and organize) the LOC's photo archive sounds, well, potentially risky, the response has been instantaneous and overwhelmingly positive. Within 24 hours of the project's launch last week, all 3,115 images had been viewed at least once (with 650,000 total views), more than 500 pictures had received comments, and 4,000 unique tags had been added. And some of them are already proving useful: users have added new information in tags and comments to portraits of boxers, sulky racers, base stealers, Riveting Rosies and many, many more.
The LOC's catalog is, of course, the property of We the People. So in a way it seems natural to tap into our aggregate wisdom to learn more about the pictures that define us. Consider it a massive wikigallery. The photos in Flickr Commons are divided into two groups. The first is a batch of 1,615 gorgeous and surprising color photographs taken between 1939 and 1944. Shot by Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information photographers during the Depression and World War II, the vibrant pictures bring new life to our black-and-white past. The second photoset comes courtesy of the long-defunct Bain News Service and compiles 1,500 journalistic snapshots from 1910 to 1912. As the photographs that comprise the Flickr Commons are all well over 50 years old, there are no known copyright restrictions on any of them—meaning people can post them on their blogs, republish them and generally do what they wish with them.
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There's somewhat more at the link, and a link to both the Flickr "Commons" (173 web pages @ 18 images per page, I believe).
The first 80 or 90 pages are color photos from around ca 1940. At somewhere near page 90 they switch to B/W photos, mostly from 1910 - 1915. The color pictures include lots of "industrial and worker" scenes from the WWII era. B/W photos have lots of famous boxers and baseball players interspersed with other "famous" people. A few pictures near the end of military "field actions."
Direct link to the Commons intro page
You can also go direct to the photos at: LOC images at Flickr
The article linked at the top also shows a link to LOC Catalog of images where there reportedly are "a million images" but I haven't checked that link out yet.
John
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sj
