CEMaT Ed Tech Connection

Last week the Library of Congress announced on its blog that it has joined the Web 2.0 shift with a pilot project that resulted in uploading to the photo-sharing site Flickr more than 3,000 photos from two collections of its vast holdings (over “14 million prints, photographs and other visual materials”). The historic images, in both black and white and color, are from the 1910s, 1930s, and 1940s and include a huge variety of subjects from agriculture to World War II to sports.

 
Delano, J. Going to town on Saturday afternoon, Greene Co., Ga.  Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. 1941.

What does this mean to the average person? LoC sees this project as leading to increased access to their informative collections. “No copyright restrictions are known to exist.” This is good news for education, but users still need to cite sources when downloading or linking to the photos. Folks with Flickr accounts can help tag the images with meaningful words or phrases. They can also leave comments about the images or add notes, opening the door to knowledge sharing or questions and answers. Many images already contain many comments, tags and notes.  People can also subscribe to a feed that automatically announces when LoC posts new photos.

Library of Congress Blog:  http://www.loc.gov/blog/?p=233

This entry was posted on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 9:34 am and is filed under Emerging Technologies, News/Announcements, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.