The Commons on Flickr

In July I wrote about the Boston Public Library’s Flickr Collection. This is part of a new trend in image sharing, exemplified by the Flickr Commons. Begun in January as a partnership between Flickr and the Library of Congress, The Commons now includes images from the photo archives of several different institutions, including:

The Library of Congress (collections include News in the 1910s and the 30s and 40s in Color),

The Smithsonian Institution (collections include Portraits of Artists and American Celebrations),

Bibliotheque de Toulouse (including collections of Personages and Portraits, as well as Architecture, Monuments, and Archeology),

The Brooklyn Museum (collections include several on Egypt, as well as an interesting bookplate collection),

The Powerhouse Museum (images of Sydney, rural life in Australia, and Australian flora and fauna),

George Eastman House (includes a collection of autochromes, a set of carte de visites and cabinet cards, among others),

and, added just this week, Britain’s National Media Museum, which has some really great historic photographs.

Keep an eye out for more collections — they’re being added all the time. These are wonderful tools for research, and the images are high-quality and tend to be pretty well documented. Part of the idea behind doing this is that users will help these institutions “fill in the blanks,” adding their own knowledge to an image record with tags and comments. For example, users have suggested that this image, thought by the Library of Congress to be near Creede, Colorado, was actually taken elsewhere. They’ve tagged the image with relevant keywords, and they’ve even tagged specific objects within the image, like the cirrus clouds.

Participating institutions are required to upload images only with no known copyright restrictions, which means the images can be used by anyone for any purpose, which, of course, includes using them in DUVAGA!