Flickr, Library of Congress Announce “The Commons”

By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews

As they say, The Commons is “your opportunity to contribute to describing the world’s public photo collections.” While the pilot project is with the Library of Congress, the hope is that other private institutions will become involved as well.

To that end, the Library of Congress has uploaded some 3,000 images out of their 14 million prints / photos and visual materials to their own Flickr page (also linked from the Commons page). What the Library of Congress would like Flickr users to do is add tags and comments to the photos, to enhance the historical value of them.

The images come from two of the most popular collections in the L0C, “American Memory: Color photographs from the Great Depression” and “The George Grantham Bain Collection“

In a blog post, the LoC said:

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. 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.

In a similar post, Flickr indicated:

There are two main aims to The Commons project, starting with the pilot: firstly, to increase exposure to the amazing content currently held in the public collections of civic institutions around the world, and secondly, to facilitate the collection of general knowledge about these collections, with the hope that this information can feed back into the catalogues, making them richer and easier to search.

What are you waiting for? Start tagging.