Library of congress goes for value added via Flicker

An exciting new collaboration has been announced between the Library of Congress and Flicker, which essentially sees the library piloting open availability to some 1500 of its most popular prints, photographs and visual material (where no known copyright restrictions exist) available via flicker. One of the main objectives is to utilize the power of the flicker community to “tag, comment and make notes on the images, just like any other Flicker photo, which will benefit not only the community but also the collections themselves.”

According to the Library, “many photos are missing key caption information such as where the photo was taken and who is pictured. If such information is collected via Flicker members, it can potentially enhance the quality of the bibliographic records for the images.”

This strikes me a good trade off flicker users add 20 million tags on a daily basis, so the library and the future will benefit by the augmentation of its collection and flicker gets to add new communities and interests to its portfolio. It will be an interesting value added experiment to watch.