The Library Of Congress Goes 2.0
from the welcome-to-the-digital-age dept
It's nice to see that there's some buzz around the announcement today from the Library of Congress that it has teamed up with Yahoo's Flickr to put public domain images online for everyone to see and comment on. That's exactly the sort of thing the Library of Congress should be doing. The Library of Congress has been working for a while on doing a better job digitizing its archives, and it's nice to see them looking for ways to take advantage of what's out there already, rather than trying to do everything internally. Part of the deal is that the LoC is encouraging people to tag and comment on the photos, hoping that it will provide additional information on some of the images that it has little information about. Mathew Ingram wonders how effective that type of "crowdsourced" effort will actually be. He's right, that it probably won't be all that useful, but it probably can't hurt either. However, what could be even more interesting was if they did something like the ESP Game to more accurately tag photos by making it into something of a game.
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Filed Under: flickr, library of congress, public domain photos, tagging
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But seriously, it's way past the stereotype. Librarians will lead the way to make technology friendly.
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