Education Law

The Commons

USA Today reports:

A collaboration between the Library of Congress and the Internet photo-sharing community Flickr is giving photography enthusiasts a chance to play history detective.

On January 16 2008, the Library of Congress teamed up with an unlikely partner, Flickr. Thus launched The Commons project. The Library has an enormous photo catalogue, containing over a million photos, but lacks any truly genuine means of classifying them. Thats' where Flickr steps in. Flickr is a community or social network based on combining visual and word data. A tremendous amount of work by its members has yielded something greater than the sum of its parts: an organic information system of descriptive words and phrases.

The Commons has created a mash-up of the Flickr community and Library of Congress photo catalogues in order to achieve two purposes:

1. To increase exposure to public photo collections, and
2. To provide a way for the general public to contribute information and knowledge.

What this really means is that people looking at photos can feed back into the catalogues, making them richer, better classified, and easier to search. So USA Today is serious when they say people can play detective. This all relates to how you can get involved. The best way is to add a tag or two to the photos you see, and if you happen to know anything else about the subject, by all means add a comment. If something piques your interest, you can even do a bit of sleuthing to find out more. Just make sure to share what you learn!

Full post as published by BoardBuzz: NSBA's Daily Weblog on July 28, 2008 (boomark / email).