Off Duty, Technology - Marine Corps Times

Flickr’s ‘Common’ site lets photo buffs play history detective

A collaboration between the Library of Congress and the Internet photo-sharing community Flickr is giving photography enthusiasts a chance to play history detective.

When the Library of Congress began looking for ways to publicize its historical photos collections last year, it found an unlikely partner in Flickr, which created a project called “The Commons” (http://www.flickr.com/commons), where the library — and now several other institutions — have posted their public photography archives.

Six months into the project, the library has been able to update 500 photo records with new information provided by Flickr users — everything from names of people and places in photographs to specific airplane models shown in photos, says Helena Zinkham, acting chief of the Prints and Photographs Division.

The library began with two major collections: 1,500 black-and-white photos taken from 1910 to 1920 by George Grantham Bain’s New York-based Bain News Service and 1,600 color shots from the Farm Service Administration/Office of War Information that were taken in the 1940s. It has since added 900 additional photos from the Bain collection.

The photos were chosen for their popularity with library visitors and the fact that they had no copyright restrictions. The Bain photos were taken before 1923 and are in the public domain; the Farm Service/Office of War Information photos were created for a federal government project, so the library already owned the rights, Zinkham says.

Both partners call the project a success. The photos have garnered 8.2 million views and 5,000 comments, and The Commons has attracted five other institutions: The Powerhouse Museum in Australia, the Toulouse Library in France, the Brooklyn Museum in New York and the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.

“All the participants at the moment have been really just stunned by the level of knowledge and also the generosity of the effort with which people are contributing,” says George Oates, who runs The Commons project for Flickr.

Sometimes users send in a photo of a place as it looks today, for a visual comparison. Other times, they provide a newspaper article or technical manual to help identify people or machines shown in photographs.

“It’s been neat that someone can figure out part of something, and someone (else) figures out the next part,” says Flickr user Patrick Coin, 49, of Durham, N.C.

Some seek to put a modern twist on photos. Paolo Ordoveza of Washington, D.C., recreated a 1943 photo of a woman on a bench at Washington’s Union Station applying lipstick: He took a photo of his wife, Amy, sitting in the exact same spot putting lip gloss on. They posted the photo as a comment on the original.

Library staff posts 50 new photos each week, Zinkham says. Recently, they added a set of pictures from 1912 that mirrored current events: Both the Olympic Games and a presidential election were occurring, she says.