Library of Congress Shares Its Photo Album
Hidden in the cellar of the largest library of the world a treasure was buried. A glut of color, monochrome and black-and-white photos was stashed away, unsorted and barely cataloged.
Not any longer, the library has decided to make it’s photographic preciousness publicly available with the help of flickr, the popular photo community. The library’s flickr account now features all the vintage, back-in-the-day, sepia-toned photos you could ever wish for. The librarians hope that the flickr community will add tags to this huge collection, so that the photos can be found easily by a keyword search. Talk about crowdsourcing.
However, Pairing flickr’s demand for fresh photo supply and the library’s need for a publishing solution seems like the perfect match. So far, 1,500 photos have been selected by the library, which has over a million more of them in stock. Below are some samples from the gallery “1930s-40s in color.”
via De-Bug Blog
By Kolja Langnese
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2 Comments, Comment or Ping
Patrick Peccatte
Hi,
We have a project similar to the LoC pilot project, called “PhotosNormandie”, which is alive since one year about:
http://www.flickr.com/people/photosnormandie/
For now, descriptions are in French language and we are trying to improve them. So, we invite comments to get better localisations, better identifications, check and verify information, etc.
A main difference between the two projects is the following: we are using IPTC metadata that are embedded in our hi-res photos, but LoC does not use IPTC and their descriptions and tags are attached to Flickr platform.
With best regards
–
Patrick Peccatte
Jan 20th, 2008
Kolja
The Boston Public Library is now on Flickr as well: http://www.flickr.com/photos/boston_public_library/sets/
More photos for you!
Jun 1st, 2008
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