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Serendipity forever
Sep. 19th, 2008 12:17 pmThe Library of Congress has a Flickr account (and their profile notes begin: "Yes. We really are THE Library of Congress.").
And they are not alone: they seem to be spearheading a new category of Flickr accounts called the Commons. A variety of libraries and museums - the Smithsonian, the Bibliothèque de Toulouse - are following them in uploading their holdings of photographs on which there are no known copyright restrictions. It's a way of showing their pictures to an audience which might not visit their web sites, but it also invites the world to tag and comment on the collection. Some of the comments are as inane as you might expect, some give genuine information. Some of the pictures are more interesting than others (the Library of Congress has an awaful lot of baseball players), but some are wonderful.
This is how I found this out: this morning's post has just arrived, and it included a postcard showing a detail of the facade of Hereford Library. Monkeys! Victorian sculpture of monkeys! Naturally, I had to find a copy for Gail (all of your monkeys are belong to Gail) and when Google Images couldn't help me, I turned to Flickr. A search on "hereford library" produced exactly what I was looking for as the sixth item in the list, among images of the building as a whole and pictures of the chained books in the cathedral library. Toweards the bottom of the first page, sandwiched between the cathedral's stained galss and its chained library was:
this photo of "Cattle in corral waiting to be weighed before being trailed to railroad, Beaverhead County, Montana". The nearest I can come to explaining this is that one of the tags implies they are Hereford cattle - oh, I see, and it's the Library of Congress - mystery solved, then!
And they are not alone: they seem to be spearheading a new category of Flickr accounts called the Commons. A variety of libraries and museums - the Smithsonian, the Bibliothèque de Toulouse - are following them in uploading their holdings of photographs on which there are no known copyright restrictions. It's a way of showing their pictures to an audience which might not visit their web sites, but it also invites the world to tag and comment on the collection. Some of the comments are as inane as you might expect, some give genuine information. Some of the pictures are more interesting than others (the Library of Congress has an awaful lot of baseball players), but some are wonderful.
This is how I found this out: this morning's post has just arrived, and it included a postcard showing a detail of the facade of Hereford Library. Monkeys! Victorian sculpture of monkeys! Naturally, I had to find a copy for Gail (all of your monkeys are belong to Gail) and when Google Images couldn't help me, I turned to Flickr. A search on "hereford library" produced exactly what I was looking for as the sixth item in the list, among images of the building as a whole and pictures of the chained books in the cathedral library. Toweards the bottom of the first page, sandwiched between the cathedral's stained galss and its chained library was:
this photo of "Cattle in corral waiting to be weighed before being trailed to railroad, Beaverhead County, Montana". The nearest I can come to explaining this is that one of the tags implies they are Hereford cattle - oh, I see, and it's the Library of Congress - mystery solved, then!
