A Big Flickr of Photo Sharing From the Library of Congress
You may post your vacation snapshots on Flickr, the photo-sharing site, but the Library of Congress has bigger plans. This week the library was overwhelmed by the public response after it put 3,100 of the most popular photos from its collection online at Flickr, getting them outside the Washington library walls and into the hands of people who want to use them. (The selected photos have no known copyright restrictions.) "The real magic comes when the power of the Flickr community takes over," noted the library's Matt Raymond in the institution's official blog. "We want people to tag, comment, and make notes on the images, just like any other Flickr photo. ... 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." Magic indeed happened, Mr. Raymond reported today. "Words are failing me right now," he wrote. (That's appropriate since he's dealing with pictures.) There have been 50,000 views, comments posted on 500 photos, and people have marked 1,200 photos as favorites. The number of tags is practically impossible to count. The only downside might be the number of bloggers writing about this, including Mr. Raymond, who succumbed to the obvious pun, "My Friend Flickr." --Josh Fischman
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