The Library of Congress’ digital archives have been a great visual resource for me in the past. Having worked at a non-profit university press, this was always the first place to look for historical images. Now, the Library of Congress (U.S) has initiated a pilot program on flickr which involves uploading 3,115 images and opening them up for public tagging. The project has already intrigued me by posting beautiful images from their collections (photographs I don’t believe I would’ve known how to begin searching for). To see the start of what I believe will be an indispensable resource, check out LOC on flickr.

The image shown here was photographed by John Vachon, c. 1942

Below is an excerpt from the Library of Congress Blog:

“As a communicator, I want to expand the reach of the Library and access to our magnificent collections as far and wide as possible. Of course, there are only so many hours in the day, so many staff in Library offices and so many dollars in the budget. Priorities have to be chosen that will most effectively advance our mission.

That’s why it is so exciting to let people know about the launch of a brand-new pilot project the Library of Congress is undertaking with Flickr, the enormously popular photo-sharing site that has been a Web 2.0 innovator. If all goes according to plan, the project will help address at least two major challenges: how to ensure better and better access to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity. In many senses, we are looking to enhance our metadata (one of those Web 2.0 buzzwords that 90 percent of our readers could probably explain better than me).

The project is beginning somewhat modestly, but we hope to learn a lot from it. Out of some 14 million prints, photographs and other visual materials at the Library of Congress, more than 3,000 photos from two of our most popular collections are being made available on our new Flickr page, to include only images for which no copyright restrictions are known to exist.”

The image shown here was photographed by John Vachon, c. 1942