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Pictures Worth a Zillion Words
For someone who went through library school just a couple years ago, I'm feeling very late to the party - or maybe just extremely forgetful. Somehow I missed that for the past 10 or so years the Library of Congress has offered digital images from its collection through its Prints and Photographs Online Catalog, with a collection of over a million images.
And now, through a cooperative effort with Flickr, called The Commons, LOC is improving access to thousands of those images (so far) through Flickr's interface and public tagging capability.
This is very cool stuff. More people will appreciate these visual documents of our nation's history, and the images will get more thorough cataloging through tagging (though possibly also more erroneous, or extraneous - I hope LOC's Flickr moderator will weed out the dumb ones occasionally). Moreover, all the images have "no known copyright restrictions", which means they can be freely shared and remixed - even more freely than a Creative Commons license allows. Just please still remember to attribute the source!
Dude! This is awesome incarnate! How had I missed hearing about it too? Thank you so much for sharing it - now I have a brand new procrastination tool.
...which of course we all need! :-) I'm curious as to how many more photos they'll be putting up in months to come. With over a million in the old digital collection, we could be looking at infinite procrastination possibilities!