Digital Home Thoughts: Library of Congress Starts Using Flickr

"The Library of Congress uploaded a couple photo archives to Flickr, a popular Internet photo sharing website. The photo archive includes thousands of historical photographs. Many are already on the library's own website, but it hopes the public will help them tag, or label, the photos on Flickr for easier accessibility. Flickr discussed the new partnership with the Library of Congress, called The Commons pilot project, in its blog. The Library of Congress has an huge photo catalog, containing more than 1 million photos, and has chosen about 1,500 photos each from two of its more popular collections to show on Flickr."

Members of Flickr or non-members, too, can view the 1930-40s in Color photo collection or the News in the 1910s photo collection. I have actually been quite impressed with the Library of Congress lately (not that I wasn't previously). The LoC has lately been investing a lot more in digitizing a large amount of their incredibly precious content. They are not only working to scan all of their books through search giants like Google and Microsoft, but now they appear to also be exposing their incredible photograph store (albeit partly for now) to the general public.