The Library of Congress is putting fascinating pictures up on Flickr. There are >3000 pics up there now, but even in the first hundred pictures, there’s a wide range of subjects: TR speaking in New Jersey, baseball players, cyclone damage, early airplanes, early 20th c. fisticuffs . . . The picture above is identified as a piece of an Oscar Wilde monument being packed or unpacked.
According to the profile, LoC is simply placing photographs on flickr with their own tag and the remaining tags are coming from the community. Comments are also coming from the flickr community. On the picture below, the comments are rather inane, making fun of the hair, but on some other pics there are links to wikipedia, clues to dating and location.
Fun facts from the profile:
We serve as the national library for the United States, based in Washington, DC. With more than 134 million items preserved on some 530 miles of bookshelves, we’re also the world’s largest library.In addition to books, we have photos, maps, databases, movies, sound recordings, sheet music, manuscripts, and information in many other formats. Millions of items are online, and the full array of collections is available in DC, right across from the U.S. Capitol building
What are photographs doing in a library?
We’ve been acquiring photos since the mid-1800s when photography was the hot new technology. Because images represent life and the world so vividly, people have long enjoyed exploring our visual collections. Looking at pictures opens new windows to understanding both the past and the present. Favorite photos are often incorporated in books, TV shows, homework assignments, scholarly articles, family histories, and much more.
The Prints & Photographs Division takes care of 14 million of the Library’s pictures and features more than 1 million through online catalogs. Offering historical photo collections through Flickr is a welcome opportunity to share some of our most popular images more widely.