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This Just In: Flickr Teams with Library of Congress

It's no secret that a lot of Idealist staff are fans of Flickr, that friendly neighborhood photo sharing site. We pull photos nearly every day from the Creative Commons pool to illustrate our blog entries; we've invited the members of our network to post photos of their Idealist events on our profile; heck, we have some albums where we just keep pictures of ourselves lookin' pretty.


Photo by David Bransby in the
1930s-40s in Color album So we were intrigued by an entry posted today on the Flickr blog. For the first time, Flickr is teaming up with a civic institution: the United States Library of Congress. Their pilot project, The Commons, has two goals: "to firstly give you a taste of the hidden treasures in the huge Library of Congress collection, and secondly to show how your input of a tag or two can make the collection even richer."

Now you don't have to visit Washington, DC to explore some of the gems in the Library of Congress photo archives; you can see them online. And with Flickr's photo tagging tool, you can help to write history by noting what you see in an image. Why not join The Commons today?