Library of Congress taps Web 2.0 to gain user expertise on photos

Computerworld - As part of an effort to expand access to its photograph collections and tap the collective knowledge of user-generated content, the Library of Congress yesterday launched a pilot project with photo-sharing site Flickr to publish some 3,000 photos.

The library's new Flickr page includes collections from the Great Depression and of life in New York City during the early 1900s for which no copyright restrictions are known to exist, said Matt Raymond, the library's director of communications.

"If all goes according to the plan, the project will help address at least two major challenges: how to ensure better and better access to our collections and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity," Raymond wrote on the library's blog.

"The real magic comes when the power of the Flickr community takes over," he added. "We want people to take, 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."

He noted that many of the photos are missing key caption information, like where the photo was taken and who is pictured.

As a part of the new project, Flickr has created a new space on its site, known as The Commons, for publicly held photograph collections. George Oates, a designer at Flickr, blogged that The Commons is aimed at increasing the exposure of content now held in public collections throughout the world and providing a place for users to post content to add to the general knowledge about the photos.

In his blog post, Oates urged users to tag content added from the Library of Congress and other public collections that may soon be added, to make "something greater than the sum of its parts: an organic information system, derived of descriptive words and phrases made entirely from individual contributions."

"There are about 20 million unique tags on Flickr today," Oates noted. "They are the bread and butter of what makes our search work so beautifully. Simply by association, tags create emergent collections of works that reinforce meaning. What if we could lend this wonderful power to some of the huge reference collections around the world? Well ... you can."