ELI’s 7 Things this month is on flickr in the document I learned that the Library of Congress has partnered with flickr.
Library of Congress Photos on Flickr (Prints and Photographs Reading Room, Library of Congress)
The project sounds interesting what caught my attention was the invitation to participate…
” We invite you to tag and comment on the photos, and we also welcome identifying informationâ??many of these old photos came to us with scanty descriptions! …
What participatory history? I concentrated on Social Studies (history really) as an education major at SUNY Fredonia (go Blue Devils). And loved the courses where we engaged in the primary resources of the time period being studied. Looking at pictures, letters, dress, etc… of the day some how drew me back to the day I could get lost in the mess for hours on end. History is about people and the pilot the LOC is doing with flickr makes history accessible to people. What an interesting mesh of structured Library stuff with user-produced content of Web 2.0 this is a fantastic mash-up of culture if you ask me.
A funny aside is that I was listening to Gardner Campbell’s talk from this year’s ELI where he references the concept of simple tools loosely joined (Jim didn’t you give a talk last year on this? If so, a link would be helpful…) as being a model of teaching and learning technologies. This use of flickr would be an example of that. I wonder how the success of this pilot impacts the need for tools such as Luna. Is a Luna like tool necessary for the back-end and a flickr like tool best used for interaction and engagement?
Any who back to my thoughts on LOC on Flickr.
The level of access that this gives people like me – who with small kids won’t get to DC in the near future and then when I do get there wouldn’t have the time to do more than notice the pictures as I ran past reminding the kids that daddy is almost done and there are chicken nuggets in it for them if I can have just a few more minutes to look at the cool stuff. – a chance to
- look at the pictures and absorb the content
- share reflections using the comments or notes tools
- help organize by adding my tag
- identify the image with place via the map tool
- respond to the image in my blog using flickr’s Blog This tool.
- see the changing collection as new images are posted (God Bless RSS)
For added reference here are a few screen shots from my few minutes on the site.
I took this one to show that Flickr users can embed notes about the picture. I wanted to share this one because note added to the value of the picture by making it a picture of pattern as much as it was a picture of industry or trains.
I wanted to share this one as it allows for humor-
And this note shows correction of the the humor…
I hope that they add more to the map. I really am interested as to where the images were taken from. I think it helps place the image in a better context.
I look forward to watching this grow and change. I hope that this is brought into the visual literacy workshop.
Thoughts, Experiments and Experiences 
I discovered these photos about a month ago. I was delighted to see that a number were of Brockton, MA, the city I grew up in, though they were taken well before I was born. I sent the link to my father, who lived in Brockton as a young boy and then again later when he married. He was able to identify one photo (http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/2179042924/) as the WL Douglas Shoe factory on Spark St in Brockton because he worked in the shoe industry on the same street. He didn’t want to add that info in a comment, but asked me to do it. Others have since commented – one who thinks the photo is elsewhere in Brockton, but that guy’s just wrong.