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Library of Congress taps into Flickr community to tag vintage images
The library of Congress is participating in the launch of a Flickr initiative dubbed "The Commons" where it has posted 3,115 vintage images Including shots of early 20th century baseball players to 1940s-era images of horse-drawn carts and factory workers. The images have been posted in an effort to solicit help from the Flickr community in tagging the works in order to bring new context to the collection. To start the library has launched the pilot program with two distinct groupings available: "1930s-40s in Color" and "News in the 1910s." One notable aspect of the project is the addition of a new Flickr copyright category in which the photos are said to have "no known copyright restrictions." Users are cautioned that this should not be read as "public domain," because that may not be the case with all images from the Library of Congress. "It's always incumbent on a user of any work to do their own due diligence" about copyright, said Matt Raymond, a public-affairs officer at the library. (The public can visit the library's Prints and Photographs Web page for an FAQ on the specifics of copyright issues pertaining to the images in The Commons project, as well as to any of the millions of other images in the library's archives.)
Flickr is envisioning that tapping into "The Commons" may be an ideal way for public or civic institutions (museums, libraries, historical societies, Etc...) to gain the benefit of the collective effort and expertise in tagging images bringing to bear the knowledge of the photo-sharing site's millions of users. The images, which previously had very little metadata attached, will now be searchable by the countless tags being added. "We're moving as aggressively as a government agency can to recognize the growing importance of Web 2.0," Raymond said. "This was a very low-cost opportunity to observe the tagging behavior and evaluate the quality we could get, and get our feet wet in a Web 2.0 community."
Source: CNET News.com
Posted in: Keywording / Metadata, News, Stock Photo Companies
