Monday, April 07, 2008

CIL2008: Library of Congress Flickr Pilot

Cyber Tour of LOC-Flickr ProjectMichelle Springer from the Library of Congress (LOC) did a 15-minute Cyber Tour about this project.

Goal -- Increase access and increase content. The project is based on the work of Picture Australia.

Flickr's tag line is "Share your photos. Watch your world." That seems appropriate for what the LOC wanted to do.

Major challenge -- copyright status statement. None of the available content licenses in Flickr were appropriate. The LOC has no right to state firmly that content is definitely in the public domain. They talked to Flickr, who then created a new model. "No known copyright restriction."

Yahoo and LOC then created a modified terms & conditions, which then allowed LOC to have an account.

Currently have two sets of photos. All photos have in-depth descriptions and a link to the high quality image photo on the LOC web site. Some photos are being posted(by other users) in groups within Flickr.

All 3,100 photos where already available on the LOC web site and had no known copyright restrictions.

Accomplishments:
  • People have made the LOC a contact on their Flickr account. And they are updated when new photos are added.
  • Aggregate views have totaled more than 6million as of early match.
  • People are adding meaningful comments, as well as links to their own (related) photos.
  • People sometimes make correction in comments to the metadata.
  • Updates and corrections are also being made to the LOC catalogue. Nearly 100 records have been updated, and Flickr is cited as the source.
Added tag by type:
  • Words copied from the LOC title/description
  • New descriptive words.
  • Transcriptions
  • Symbolism
  • Topics
  • Commentary
  • Humor
  • New subject words
  • Geo tags
  • Emotional tags
Most popular images have reached their maximum number of tags.

Other institutions are going to follow the LOC's lead.

She pointed us towards the project's FAQ for more information.

Roy Tennant also talked about this project in his presentation, so look for more info in those notes.


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