Library of Congress Hearts Flickr

Katherine Mangu-Ward | December 23, 2008

In January, I blogged about a pilot project at the Library of Congress to upload old, under-indexed photos to the photosharing site Flickr and ask the public to add tags, annotations, and explanations to the images. The project has been a roaring success.

One year on, some impressive stats:
• 10.4 million views of the photos on Flickr.
• More than 15,000 Flickr members have chosen to make the Library of Congress a “contact,” creating a photostream of Library images on their own accounts.
• 7,166 comments were left on 2,873 photos by 2,562 unique Flickr accounts.
• 67,176 tags were added by 2,518 unique Flickr accounts.
• 4,548 of the 4,615 photos have at least one community-provided tag.
• Less than 25 instances of user-generated content were removed as inappropriate.

Just by opening up the collection, the Library of Congress has dramatically increased the value of its photo archive. They're adding an additional 50 photos every week, so keep tagging.

Via librarian.net

Comments

Hugh Akston|12.23.08 @ 1:34PM|#

It's all well and good to let the hoi palloi think they can make their little contributions, but I certainly hope we have some civic-minded public servant-or better yet, a committee of them-with power to approve or edit those tags.

If transactions like this aren't regulated by someone with the right vision and the power to back it up, why everything degenerates into nihilistic anarchy!

Orange Line Special|12.23.08 @ 2:17PM|#

Another great post from Katherine Mangu-Ward, the Reason staffer who spends the most time scouring through BoingBoing's feed.

Meanwhile, leave the thinking to me.

|12.23.08 @ 2:57PM|#

Perhaps I alone realize that this volunteerism is taking away jobs from self serving well meaning bureaucrats that could be paid for by the soon to be unveiled stimulus plan.

This must be stopped, it's harming the recovery.

|12.23.08 @ 2:59PM|#

LoneWacko, you ignorant blow your own (undersized) horn twit,

Don't you have somehere to go?

|12.23.08 @ 3:58PM|#

Dammit. I was all set to offer my once-a-year kudos to the gubmint on this one, then I saunter into the comments only to find LoneWacko pleasuring himself in front of a mirror.

Thanks for ruining a perfectly good fluff post.