Print this article  |  E-mail this article  |  Comment on this article

Library of Congress publishes historical photos on Flickr

By Tim Conneally, BetaNews

January 17, 2008, 5:41 PM

The Library of Congress has published over 3,000 photographs from two of its most popular collections on Flickr in "The Commons," a project aimed at creating a rich database of photos from public collections and civic institutions.

Photos from the George Grantham Bain Collection and the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information were chosen for display online due to their popularity on the Library of Congress site, and their freedom from copyright restrictions.

By posting these photos, the Library hopes to not only increase their visibility, but also increase their value through social tagging and community input. The Bain collection has minimal identifying information, and the FSA/OWI collection has only some subject indexing, so comments and tags are encouraged.

The Library is also open to suggestions for which collections to post in the future, and according to the FAQ, many already have photos of the American Civil War in mind.

Photo from Library of Congress' Flickr collection

Add a Comment (3 Comments)

BetaNews reserves the right to remove any comment at any time for any reason. Please keep your responses appropriate and on topic. Foul language and personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Name (required):

E-mail (required):

Enter Your Comment:

By Bogunch

posted Jan 18, 2008 - 11:17 AM

??? "The Library is also open to suggestions for which future collections to post,..."

WTF ...or do you mean - whch collections to post in the furture???

Score: 0

By Avion Airplane

posted Jan 18, 2008 - 8:20 AM

now how cool is that

Score: 0

By Banquo

posted Jan 17, 2008 - 6:06 PM

Nice, a fresh source of desktop wallpapers.

Score: 0

Aug 7 - 7:10 PM ET Mozilla Labs considers grafting IM onto Firefox

Aug 7 - 6:04 PM ET Ubuntu attracts the lion's share of LinuxWorld's smaller crowds

Aug 7 - 5:25 PM ET IBM VP urges open source devs to make Linux less like Windows

Aug 7 - 5:18 PM ET LinuxWorld shows off the latest data center-in-a-truck

Aug 7 - 4:58 PM ET Toshiba doubles its embedded flash capacity to catch up with Samsung

Aug 7 - 3:57 PM ET Merged Sirius XM sees growth for sat radio, despite low stock price

Aug 7 - 3:35 PM ET BitTorrent calls reports of staff layoff 'inaccurate'

Aug 7 - 3:29 PM ET How did Dell get 'carbon neutral?'

Aug 7 - 3:01 PM ET Could open source be the solution to the e-voting debacle?

Aug 7 - 12:56 PM ET Report: Unhackable e-passports hacked within minutes