Flickr’s blog claims there are now 20 million unique tags on Flickr. To harness that Flickr power, Yahoo!has launched a project called “The Commons” to benefit cultural institutions to share and distribute their work.
As the first pilot project, the US Library of Congress has released 1,500 historic images for which the Library is not the IP owner. The rights languages on these photos is “no known copyright restrictions” which doesn’t mean the image is in the public domain but does indicate that no evidence has been found to show that restrictions apply.
They are inviting any and all interested to provide tags and leave comments for these photos –http://flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress and have started a waiting list to gauge interest from other institutions.
One Comment
This is a great find Kerry, I am very interested in the idea of analysing people’s tags - and what an excitingly huge set of data to work with. It is a bit like the Museums project Steve (see http://www.steve.museum/ ), an experiment in social tagging of museum collections. It’s interesting that not just the users’ vocabulary but also their knowledge and their analysis will be harvested and shared.
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