flickr

Half dozen major government libraries, including the New York Public Library, the Dutch Nationaal Archief, and the State Library of New South Wales, all have something in common: they each have uploaded thousands of their archives' photographs and associated metadata to the photo-sharing website Flickr for (nearly) unrestricted sharing, commenting, and collective tagging.

But the groundwork for these enterprises was laid by colleagues of Michelle Springer, Project Manager for Digital Initiatives at the U.S. Library of Congress.

Since January 2008, Springer has been shepherding a pilot program, uploading chosen collections to the Library of Congress' Flickr site, including "The 1930s-40s in Color" and "News in the 1910s". As her report on the pilot describes (www.loc.gov/rr/print/flickr_report_final.pdf), the results were impressive:

• As of October 23, 2008, there have been 10.4 million views of the Library of Congress' photos on Flickr.
• The Library made 15,000 Flickr contacts.
• 2,518 Flickr users added 67,176 tags to photos.
• More than 500 of the Library's records were enhanced with new information provided by Flickr users.
• And visits to the Library's Prints and Photographs Online Catalog increased 20% from January to May 2008 compared to the same period the year before.

But through a civic media lens, what does Springer expect the long-term effects of Flickr to be for major public libraries and the people they serve? I interviewed her by email in mid-December to get a better idea....

I keep coming across remarkable collections of Obama photography, except in this case...