User Generated Content Grows in Credibility

Read/Write/Web reports this week:

The Library of Congress and photosharing site Flickr have 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. The Commons encourages people to help describe the historical photos being added to Flickr by institutions like Library of Congress by tagging them or commenting on them.

“From the Library’s 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. “One of our goals, frankly, is to learn as much as we can about that power simply through the process of making constructive use of it."