The Library of Congress Flickr’s the Switch
The Library of Congress Flickr’s the Switch
January 18, 2008: The US Library of Congress has started a trial run of putting 3,000 of it’s archived photos up on the popular picture-sharing site ‘Flickr’.
The Flickr gallery is an experiment which aims to have users ‘tag’ the images and get the community involved in the identification of thousands of archive photos.
“If all goes according to 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.” said Matt Raymond, director, Library of Congress in an official blog post.
This latest announcement follows on from the massive imaging project which the Library of Congress hoped would enable greater access to their records through digitisation.
Whether or not the world’s largest library’s foray into the world of web 2.0 and universal collaboration will be successful remains to be seen, but the project is similar in nature to Wikipedia when it first began being that it’s opening itself up to user based editing, and that project has gone on to phenomenal heights of success. Should the trial prove successful the Library of Congress intends to serve up even more of its collection on Flickr.