Flickr is working with the Library of Congress on new project The Commons. Currently there are around three thousand photographs up there from two collections, and according to the Commons homepage they’re all copyright-free. More information in the relevant post on the Flickr blog.
This is wonderful news, especially because the collection is being released through a slightly adapted version of Flickr’s existing website. This means, apart from it being an established interface that millions of people already know vaguely how to use, that you can do all the Flickry things with the photos—dedicated Flickr-heads will hopefully give a more qualified response in due course—and that third-party tools should already be set up to work with the content. The meta information storage won’t particularly excite any Dublin-Core enthusiasts—a block of unstructured HTML in the standard Flickr notes field, plus of course Flickr tagging—but the whole project is still a fascinating experiment, and interesting for even the casual observer of American history. How exciting does it get? More exciting than the World of Mirth Shows?
Thinking offline for a moment, this hopefully presages more leaps forward in MLA culture. One of the first would be to remove the “NO PHOTOGRAPHS” signs from all museums. At the very least such signs could be more honest, and instead read “NO PHOTOGRAPHS; unless our security guards don’t catch you at it, in which case we’ll be blissful in our ignorance. Anyway, in five years time it’ll all be online so we don’t know why we’re bothering, to be honest….” On reflection, I suppose they would need bigger signs.
