Media News - Friday, January 18, 2008

Flickr brings tagging to vintage images

Scores of gorgeous historic photos showed up on Flickr this week, and the public is busy tagging them in an effort to bring new context to the collection. The labeling is part of a pilot project by the U.S. Library of Congress, which is making 3,115 of its archival photos available for public tagging in an attempt to bring a sort of ‘wisdom of the crowds’ intelligence to the photos' metadata. The project kicked off Wednesday in conjunction with the launch of a Flickr initiative dubbed ‘The Commons.’ For now, the library is making two distinct groupings available on the popular photo-sharing site: ‘1930s-40s in Color’ and ‘News in the 1910s.’ The Commons is Flickr's attempt to showcase and add context to the archives of public-facing institutions - first the Library of Congress and later potentially others, such as museums or other civic entities. One notable aspect of the project is the addition of a new Flickr copyright category in which the photos are said to have ‘no known copyright restrictions.’ It might be tempting to read that designation as equating to ‘public domain,’ but that's not the case, say those driving the initiative at the Library of Congress. The public can visit the library's FAQ page on the specifics of copyright issues pertaining to the images in The Commons project. The Library of Congress initiative shares characteristics of projects like SETI@home and Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk, both of which harness the power of the masses to look for solutions. (CNet News)

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