Where does your personal photostream end and your professional one begin?

If you're a journalist asking that question, Jennifer Gaie Hellum at the University of Arizona's a nice post for you. Turns out, it's not as simple as you think, at least if you're new to Flickr.

Among the items of advice, given that it's nearly impossible to "professionalize" a Flickr photostream that started off with personal items, are:

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:

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

...it's from "Obama for America" itself.