Tagging the Past

A while back I read about the collaboration between the Library of Congress photo collection collaborating with Flickr and going online. This was interesting but it didn’t get me excited. But when I looked more closely at it I did become excited (insert sarcasm here).

Library of Congress “Italian Artillery in Tripoli

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print

The Library of Congress has a Prints and Photographs Online Catalog comprised of over 1 million images (and growing) that have been available online for over 10 years. This is cool but not exciting. It’s not that the pictures are online but the point is to allow everyone to go look at the pictures and start adding tags and comments. This makes the Library of Congress’ collection on Flickr interesting because first becomes a site of huge potential interaction and if this works it will also create a huge searchable database.

This is, of course, very exciting 🙂

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