Library Of Congress Gets Flickr Friendly
After entering the blogosphere this summer and battling hackers who tried to post movie-copying code, the Library of Congress is now braving the social networking realm of online photo-sharing.
On Wednesday, the government institution announced it is making more than 3,000 photos available on the commercial picture-swap site Flickr. The library spokesman Matt Raymond explained that the Flickr page dedicated to the library's collections will only contain images "for which no copyright restrictions are known to exist."
Raymond is encouraging people to tag, comment and make notes on the photos -- the typical Flickr protocols. "The real magic comes when the power of the Flickr community takes over," he said.
Many library photos are missing key caption information like where the photo was shot and who is in the picture. If Flickr members privy to that kind of information type in messages, the comments "can potentially enhance the quality of the bibliographic records for the images."
As part of the project, Flickr has created a new layout for publicly-held photographic collections called “The Commons.” Flickr states on the page: "Hopefully, this pilot can be used as a model that other cultural institutions would pick up, to share and redistribute the myriad collections held by cultural heritage institutions all over the world." -- Aliya Sternstein
Update: Public Knowledge's Alex Curtis weighed in on the library's announcement, saying that his group has previously "tried to encourage this kind of outside-the-box partnership at the Copyright Office and in Congress to address photographers' concerns with a legislative solution for the orphan works problem."
"When you expose these otherwise hidden collections so they may be viewed, tagged with descriptions, and searched by anyone, you make it easier for others to identify and get permission to use the works in transformative ways," he told us.
If companies like Flickr had access to the entire copyright registry, that exposure -- amplified with "crowd-sourced" tagging -- would incentivize copyright owners to put works online, in ways the current registry cannot. "It would promote registration, orphan works would be matched to their owners, users could legally transform the works, and artists would be compensated for their creations," Curtis said. -- Andrew Noyes
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