The Library of Congress’ photo collection on Flickr
Monday, April 14th, 2008One social network I use more than any other, probably, is Flickr, an online service for photo (and, recently, video) sharing. Flickr has thousands, if not millions, of members sharing photos with friends, family, or even the world–for example, I took lots of photos of some of the various national championship-related celebrations this past week, and have made them viewable to anyone who wants to check them out. (Take it from someone who was 2,000 miles away for our previous two trips to the Final Four–Lawrence is an awfully fun place to be when Kansas is still playing basketball in April.)
Today I learned that the Library of Congress has an account on Flickr and is making its vast collection of photography available there. However, the LOC isn’t just putting these photos online to be nice–they need your help. As it states in their user profile, “many of [their] old photos came to [them] with very little description”–so they’re turning to the Flickr community for help, inviting other members to “tag” or keyword photos or offer additional information through Flickr’s comments function. Flickr members have responded–providing keywords, linking to other information about the subject, or just providing encouragement.
I’m sharing this for two reasons: First, I think it’s a really cool idea and an excellent example of crowdsourcing–opening up a problem to a large audience to assign more brains to the task of solving it. Second, the Library of Congress has harnessed the power of an existing tool and an existing network of people for this problem, rather than reinvent the wheel. I’ve done plenty of wheel reinventing in my day, and frankly, there are more fulfilling ways to spend one’s time.
Do you give up control? Probably–but from what I’ve observed in this project (and other, larger crowdsourcing initiatives like Wikipedia) is that altruism tends to outweigh graffiti. And the audience might even be smarter than they’re given credit for.
