LOC befriends Flickr
The Library of Congress recently announced their new Flickr page. Here's a little bit about the project and why they're doing it:
The project is beginning somewhat modestly, but we hope to learn a lot from it. Out of some 14 million prints, photographs and other visual materials at the Library of Congress, more than 3,000 photos from two of our most popular collections are being made available on our new Flickr page, to include only images for which no copyright restrictions are known to exist.The real magic comes when the power of the Flickr community takes over. We want people to tag, comment and make notes on the images, just like any other Flickr photo, which will benefit not only the community but also the collections themselves. For instance, 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.
They get it! What a wonderful project and a great example of what we could all do with our local collections. Do any of you have ideas for a similar project your library could try?
>> contributed by Beth
I was interested to read about LOC and Flickr because we recently did the same with our photos from our local history collection. Here's the link http://picasaweb.google.com/kaukaunapubliclibrary
Thanks for sharing your link, Maggie! I enjoyed perusing your collection. May I ask why you chose picasa web albums over flickr or something else?
We used Picasa because our volunteer was familiar with it and was able to get the scanning of 2,000 photos done in about 5 days - while still leading a normal life! We investigated doing this via an LSTA digitalization grant but decided we did not have the staff hours to organize this collection using the LSTA grant parameters. Also, we did not have to invest (precious) staff hours in preparing our photos to send to Madison. We had to consider the time it would take to prepare them to be shipped as well as keeping track of what was sent and what was returned.