photo by John Vachon (1942)
The Library of Congress Blog announced this past week the launch of a new pilot project with Flickr to make over 3000 vintage photographs from the LOC’s collection available to the public, with the promise of adding more photos to their photostream at a later date. One of the LOC’s goals in this partnership is to provide better public access to its collections. Another goal is to enlist the help of the Flickr community in identifying, describing and classifying the photos, many of which have little or no descriptive information available. Any registered Flickr user who wants to assist in this process can make comments or add tags to the photographs.
Browsing through the photographs, which for now consist of black-and-white news images from the 1910s and color images from the 30s and 40s, is a treat. What really interested me though was that these images have “no known copyright restrictions,” which I take to mean they can be used by students in the classroom for multimedia projects and presentations. On the downside, Flickr is blocked in many schools and thus students won’t be able to access these photos from school computers. Sigh . . .
If you want to check this new online collection out, go to The Commons.
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