Thanks to my colleague Günter Waibel I discovered that the Smithsonian Institution has joined the Flickr Commons Project. They’ve uploaded over 800 photographs in several collections, including portraits of artists, scientists, and inventors. The Smithsonian is following in the footsteps of the Library of Congress, which uploaded over 3,000 photographs earlier in the year. Staff at the LOC termed it an "astounding" success, with many new views of the content as well as many user-contributed tags and comments — some of which even made it back into the Library of Congress catalog to correct and enrich the records therein.
Part of what I find so interesting about these projects is the unpredictability of what people will be inspired to do. For example, the Library of Congress noted on its blog today that a person who lived near where one of the historic photos was shot went to the same place and tried to recreate the photo. "The Library of Congress on Flickr is, to me," the photographer gushes, "without exaggeration, one of the awesomest things on the internet and in the world: scanned prints of historic public domain photos, uploaded for the community to openly view, tag, and comment." When libraries, archives, and museums can inspire such enthusiasm from a user something really, really good is happening.
About Roy Tennant