General view of one of the classification yards of the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad, Chicago, Ill. (LOC), originally uploaded by The Library of Congress
That’s why it is so exciting to let people know about the launch of a brand-new pilot project the Library of Congress is undertaking with Flickr, the enormously popular photo-sharing site that has been a Web 2.0 innovator. 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. In many senses, we are looking to enhance our metadata (one of those Web 2.0 buzzwords that 90 percent of our readers could probably explain better than me).
My Friend Flickr: A Match Made in Photo Heaven
This is amazing. The LOC’s digital collection is amazing and mostly free, as in beer and as in speech. Yet their search page is so horrible it is almost unusable (only the content makes slogging through the interface worthwhile).
More information:
- My Friend Flickr: A Match Made in Photo Heaven
- LOC’s Flickr Page
- Flickr’s announcement: Many hands make light work