Documents. Library of Congress Teams with Flickr - ReadWriteWeb. The Library of Congress and photosharing site Flickr today announced a partnership that will put photos from the LoC's collection online in a social environment and users to interact with them. The Library is home to more than 14 million photographs and other visual materials, and to start they've selected about 1500 works each from two of their collections that are known to exist in the public domain. The images come from the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information and The George Grantham Bain Collection, for which no known copyright exists. The collections will be housed on the LoC's Flickr page. As part of the pilot program with the Library of Congress, Flickr has launched a new tagging initiative called The Commons. "From the Librarys perspective, this pilot project is a statement about the power of the Web and user communities to help people better acquire information, knowledge and -- most importantly -- wisdom," said Matt Raymond, the LoC's blogger-in-chief.
Reverse Image Search. Smithsonian Joins the Flickr Commons - Tennant: Digital Librarie. Lorcan Dempsey's weblog: Tagging at the network level. LC and Flickr - 3 months later. We had the good fortune today to talk to Helena Zinkham, Michelle Springer and some additional staff members from the 12 people team at LC which worked on the LC-Flickr project. We were also joined by George Oates, who shepherded the collaboration from the Flickr side. The conversation highlighted a number of interesting facets of the collaboration which I hadn’t fully appreciated yet, and I thought they’d be worth sharing In a very elegant way, Flickr solves the authority conundrum of exposing collections content to social process. No need to worry if some comments or tags are misleading, arbitrary or incorrect – it’s not happening on your site, but in a space where people know and expect a wide variety of contributions.
On the other hand, LC selectively reaps the benefit of these contributions. Over 100 cataloging records have been changed through input from the Flickr community. Identifying and siphoning off the information of use to LC is a time-consuming and laborious process. Problem: Finding archival content on Flickr. Solution: A new Fli. Following up on the last week’s post about the LOC, I spent a little bit of time looking for archival material on Flickr. As of this morning, if you search all the images for the tag “archives,” you get 29,783 results. On the first few pages, none appeared to be the images of documents from archival collections (although there was an interesting bunch taken inside the stacks of the State Archives of Milan).
If you search everyone’s photos for the tag “archival,” you get 3,992 results — again, many interesting images, none of those on the first few pages are archival materials. Searching for “people” (which are really individual accounts) for archives gives you 113 hits, of which some are archival institutions but most appear to be other kinds of groups or people. (By the way, in the course of doing this I’ve added quite a few links to the “Flickr” area of my 2.0 resources page.
And what tags do you think we should suggest be consistently applied to archival content? Be Sociable, Share! Blog Archive » Is Flickr “legitimate” for archives now that LOC. It’s not just for colleges and universities anymore. As you’ve probably heard by now, the Library of Congress has posted over 3,000 items from two if its most popular photographic collections on Flickr.
As Matt Raymond, LOC blogger, says in his excellent post: The real magic comes when the power of the Flickr community takes over. We want people to tag, comment and make notes on the images, just like any other Flickr photo, which will benefit not only the community but also the collections themselves. For instance, many photos are missing key caption information such as where the photo was taken and who is pictured. The LOC images are organized into two Flickr sets: “News in the 1910s” and “1930s – 40s in Color.” LOC refers to this effort as a pilot, and as it states in its FAQ, two out of its three goals for the project are about the institution itself learning: Be Sociable, Share! Flickr Takes Historical Imagery To The Masses. TunnelBug's photosets on Flickr. Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control (Library of. The charge of the group was to present findings on how bibliographic control and other descriptive practices can effectively support management of and access to library materials in the evolving information and technology environment, recommend ways in which the library community can collectively move toward achieving this vision, and advise the Library of Congress on its role and priorities.
See below for the initial report and background documents of the group as well as the responses and recommendations that followed the report's release in early 2008. Reports, Studies, and Recommendatons "On the Record" Recommendations and Study Response to the Final Report of the Working Group Associate Librarian Deanna Marcum responds to On the Record: Report of The Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control Read final document (June 1, 2008) [PDF, 493 KB] "On the Record" Final Report and Testimony. Blog Archive » Implications for archives in LOC’s Report on the.
I had a topic in mind for today’s post, but then I ran across this document and wanted to ask some questions about it. The Library of Congress’s Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control has issued a draft version of its report for public comment (comments due December 15). The report contains findings and recommendations in five areas. One of them is “Enhance Access to Rare and Unique Materials.” The recommendations in this area are: When I read these recommendations, I was unsure what the implications were for the archival community. Have any archivists been consulted about these recommendations? Be Sociable, Share! Researchers Co-Op Flickr with 3-D Effects | The Underwire from W. InShare0 Flickr has become the modern day slide show, but who knew the photo sharing site could help build 3-D composites of our most famous landmarks.
Researchers at the University of Washington have developed a piece of software that synthesizes thousands of photos, digitally edits out your kids cheesing for the camera, calculates where each photographer was standing when they took the shot. By comparing two photos taken from slightly different perspectives, the software applies principles of computer vision to figure out the distance to each point. The app then stitches the photos together to create a highly detailed 3-D model of the Statue of Liberty, the Grand Canyon, or any number of tourist destinations getting snapped by the minute.
The challenge to using random travel snaps is there’s no consistency from one shot to the next. [via Business Week; image via UW News]