The Library of Congress is working hard to encourage people to use its digital collections, so it’s begun a new site on Flickr called The Commons. Basically, it’s a big pile of historical photos available free for everyone to rummage through – and I’m, of course, thinking about young people looking for pictures to use for assignments and for fun.
They’re inviting everyone to tag (or leave comments on) individual photos in the collection – which, if you’re a librarian, is both a slightly scary and an extremely cool idea. What will happen when we let the general public catalog one of the LOC’s collections? The photo I’m using here is of a female Vega Aircraft Corporation worker, taken in 1942. If you go to the page with the original photo, you can get more information on it, and read the comments folks have already left.
Come to think of it, librarians, this could be an interesting project for any young people you work with regularly – what terms would they use to tag these pictures? It could be an interesting look at what librarians are trained to do.
January 17, 2008 at 7:24 pm
Thanks for posting this! What a great resource.
January 17, 2008 at 10:07 pm
I was just talking about the LOC American Memory project the other day, and I think this will be even easier for students to use, the bad part for me, my district blocks Flickr – so there would be no way for me to SHOW my students how to get to this.
January 18, 2008 at 1:56 am
Kathy– I think that’s a big issue in these days of Web 2.0. Schools block sites like MySpace and Flickr because they’re so popular. Libraries (like the LOC) stake out a space on those sites because they’re so popular. –W