Commons Ground
| Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 | --Sean |
The Library of Congress has released more than 3,000 historical photos into the wilds of the Flickrverse. You can start viewing 'em here, and read all about the initiative here and here.
One of the hopes of the Library of Congress for this project, called The Commons by Flickr, is to provide "missing key caption information such as where the photo was taken and who is pictured". That would add tangible value of revealing new information about the photo and enriching the collection on a bibliographic level. I'm not so sure that much of that will happen, with people pointing out specific details about people and places. What I love about this project is the idea of using the community to add metadata to previously static artifacts, to provide associations and sentiment and opinion. You won't get someone saying whether J. P. Weatherby is featured in the background of a photo, but you will get them saying whether the photo is funny. You also get categorization and discovery. There are more than 20 pictures of horses. You can find 16 images featuring flags. Very small numbers so far, but as people explore, hopefully they'll increase. I think that this will really help people of the internet really consume, appreciate, and give back to items of history.