Library’s Flickr Site Celebrates the Taggable Twos

(Guest post by Michelle Springer, Library of Congress Office of Strategic Initiatives)

Jan. 16 is the two-year anniversary of the launch of the Library’s account on Flickr, the photosharing website. We started with approximately 3,100 photos in our account; today 30 additional archives, libraries, and museums from the U.S., Australia, Canada, France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Scotland, and Sweden now contribute images with no known copyright restrictions to the “Commons” on Flickr.

The Commons loudly invited people to “help describe the world’s public photo collections,” which in turn inspired a spontaneous “Friends group” and website called Indicommons, where supporters write about interesting images, curate thematic selections, set up interactive games, and create new applications.

As of today, there have been more than 23 million views of the images and more than  27,700 Flickr community members call us a contact.  In two years, we have loaded more than 8,000 images in two collections (historic photographs and historic newspapers) in 11 sets on diverse topics—baseball, women’s rights, and Abraham Lincoln, to name a few. Over a thousand records in the Prints and Photographs online catalog have been enhanced with information from the Flickr Commons community.  More accurate and detailed information in our catalog, with links to interesting histories, makes the pictures not only easier to find but easier to understand.  The interactions with our photos are remarkably varied-ranging from the practical (corrected spellings and dates) to the imaginative. Energy for volunteering information continues to run high. 

Just in time for the birthday, there’s a new Library of Congress set on Flickr, titled “Great Comments, THANK YOU!” It points to images that generated a variety of interesting comments.

We look forward to the coming year and making more connections!

Library of Congress Experience Sneak Preview

This past Monday, Cheryl Regan of the Library’s Interpretive Programs Office (i.e., she’s in charge of exhibitions) was gracious enough to allow me to tip-toe around the fabrication materials and power tools over in the Thomas Jefferson Building and lead me on a behind-the-scenes tour of the installation of our new Library of Congress Experience.

We’re having a big public celebration and grand opening on April 12 from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., so if you’re in DC, stop by to “explore, discover and be inspired.” (That’s the tagline that folks in the DC are hopefully starting to see on ads.) There will be plenty of time for a visit after the Cherry Blossom Parade ends.

There is truly a tremendous amount of activity occurring in the building (which is closed to the public, except the reading rooms, until April 12), and I just walked back from there to see that so much progress has been made even since I shot this video. Nevertheless, I hope it whets your appetite.

There is so much more I could have shown too, but I wanted to come in under the YouTube 10-minute limit. And for those of you who want to see the Library do even more with video behind my first rather amateurish attempt, well, just you wait.

A full transcript follows after the jump …

UPDATE: I replaced the herky-jerky video from the original post with a better version.

Read more »