Flickr Brings History in Imagery

Yahoo!'s photo sharing service has had this one in the brewing for a while now and the magnitude of the whole thing is yet to be seen. With the launch of the two sets of photos, we've been given a small taste of what is yet to come in "The Commons" pilot project, which brings together Flickr and the Library of Congress.

The first one is the "American Memory: Color photographs from the Great Depression" and it is a collection of images depicting life during those times, both in rural areas and urban ones, migrant labor and, of course, the effects that the Great Depression had on people and their habitats. The pictures have been hand picked by the Library team to be the most representative of the period and their number is a statement to the visual imagery resources the Congress really has at its disposal: 1500 photos have been uploaded in this single collection on Fickr.

The George Grantham Bain Collection is the second one that they've put together and managed to release today and it contains "photos produced and gathered by George Grantham Bain for his news photo service, including portraits and worldwide news events, but with special emphasis on life in New York City," as the Library of Congress website informs us. It also numbers fifteen hundred pictures.

"There are two main aims to The Commons project, starting with the pilot: firstly, to increase exposure to the amazing content currently held in the public collections of civic institutions around the world, and secondly, to facilitate the collection of general knowledge about these collections, with the hope that this information can feed back into the catalogues, making them richer and easier to search," the Flickr blog presenting the project said. In other words, they want users to tag the photos, making them easier to find. Shrewd publicity stunt, but the result would be beneficial, don't you think?