Open Source Visual History

For documentarians, the Library of Congress image collections have long served as a fertile source for public domain historical images. But finding the right photo has often meant either drilling down into online collections or wrestling with not-so-user-friendly archival databases. However, the library of record has just taken an interesting leap, announcing a joint project with photo-sharing site Flickr. As Matt Raymond writes on the LOC blog:

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.

This pilot project launches a new Flickr effort called The Commons which hopes to lure other museums and libraries into posting their collections. But the quality of user-provided information will help to determine whether those institutions will bite. So far the audience has proved enthusiastic--the comments on the two photosets are unanimously appreciative. But the quality of the tagging may be another issue. Take the case of the sideshow poster, above, variously tagged "chubby," "lesbo," and "fat activism." As commenter marypbc notes, "there needs to be a way to mark suggested tags as inappropriate." Dewey: 1-- Folksonomy: 0