Flickr has unveiled a new project, dubbed The Commons, which will give Flickr members an opportunity to browse and tag photos from Library of Congress archives. The goal is to create what Flickr likes to call an "organic information system," in other words, a searchable database of tags that makes it easier for researchers to find images.
The pilot project features a small sampling of the Library of Congress' some 14 million images. For now you'll find two collections. The first is called “American Memory: Color photographs from the Great Depression” and features color photographs of the Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information Collection including “scenes of rural and small-town life, migrant labor, and the effects of the Great Depression.”
The second collection is the The George Grantham Bain Collection which features “photos produced and gathered by George Grantham Bain for his news photo service, including portraits and worldwide news events, but with special emphasis on life in New York City.” The Bain collection images date from around 1900-1920.
In effect the Library of Congress has become a Flickr user, complete with its own stream and while it's great to see these image available to a much wider audience, we're not so sure how much it's going to help researchers.
If you're looking for historical photographs do you want to search through comments from self-appointed experts criticizing the composition skills of photography pioneers or adding the ever insightful “wow?” Then there's the inevitable comments soliciting photos to be added to whatever banal and increasingly inane groups and pools that Flickr members have come up with.
The tagging aspect will no doubt produce something of value, but pardon our cynicism, this may well turn out to be a good test of whether the positive aspects of the Flickr community outweigh the negative.
