The Library of Congress Teams Up With Flickr

The Library of Congress has teamed up with Flickr to create The Commons. The Library of Congress has added a sample of their over one million photos to Flickr, so that the Flickr community can help describe the photos through tagging.

My Friend Flickr: A Match Made in Photo Heaven from the Library of Congress Blog writes that the goal of this partnership is to help “better access to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity.” They have selected about 1,500 photos each from two of their more popular collections and posted them on Flickr for this purpose.

Many hands make light work from the Flickr Blog asks us to do our part by tagging as many of the photos as possible. How do you do that? If you are viewing an image on Flickr, on the right hand column, there is a section called “Tags.” If you are logged into Flickr, you will be able to add your own tags to those photos. Tags are a way of describing the image, which will ultimately help users search for those pictures and give the Library of Congress a more complete and comprehensive method of organizing those photos.

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Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.