LAist: Library of Congress Goes Flickr

January 17, 2008

Library of Congress Goes Flickr

Library of Congress uploaded 3000 pictures to flickr
Photo by Jack Delano via Library of Congress on Flickr

The above photo is of a co-op orange packing plant in Redlands, 60 miles East of Los Angeles. A workman is doing the preliminary sorting and picking out the discards. This is just one of the 3,000 images the Library of Congress uploaded to Flickr, Yahoo's photo sharing service, yesterday.

In a pilot project announced Wednesday, the government archive put the public-domain, copyright-free photos on the Library of Congress Flickr page. That's just a small fraction of 14 million photos and other visual materials at the Library of Congress, according to the archive's blog, but hey, it's a pilot project. [Underexposed/CNET]

Unfortunately, the uploaded photos were not tagged, leaving it up the Flickr community to do so. Searching for "California" or "Los Angeles" still has limiting results. As Stephen Shankland says at CNET's Underexposed blog, "it's a safe bet that the Library of Congress photos won't immediately sport a huge range of highly descriptive tags... I can't imagine the government would pay on its own to fund some dedicated tagging effort."

By Zach Behrens in News | Link | Comments (4) | Recommend this! (4) |

Tags: Angeles, As, California, Congress, Flickr, fruit, internet, Library of Congress, library of congress, Los, Los Angeles, media, orange, redlands, technology, web 2.0, Wednesday

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Comments (4) [rss]

[1] | 01/17/08 09:30AM
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It's a drop in the ocean, but it's a great move by LofC. Thanks for the heads up!

[2] | 01/17/08 10:31AM
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Redlands is 60 miles East of Los Angeles ;)

[3] | 01/17/08 10:39AM
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temporary sense of loss of direction fixed. Thanks wagon.

[4] | 01/17/08 11:18AM
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Not sure where Shankland concludes that these photos won't be richly tagged now that they are in Flickr. It explicitly states (in boldface) that open, user-generated tagging is one of the main principles of the Flickr Commons project.

Not to mention, the Library of Congress' blog is impressive in it's own sense -- obviously operated by a competent and websavvy individual -- it operates on Wordpress and it looks and operates like a good web 2.0 government archive should.

Viva le transparency.