Since I seem to be posting a lot about flickr these days, I thought I’d make a plug for The Commons:

This project has actually been evolving for a long time. I used to hear a lot of negative opinions from independent researchers about the Library of Congress in general and specific doubts about whether the [tag]Prints and Photographs Online Catalog[/tag] would ever reach it’s full potential. It always seemed to me that what these individuals were really saying was, “this is going to be a lot of hard work and I want other people to do it for me and then let me use the results for free in the public domain.” Plus, none of them seemed to have a definition of full potential that was particularly broad in scope.

Although I am at times vocal in my critique of [tag]Wikipedia[/tag] and other communally produced information sources, I don’t see them as the end of civilization nor as the end for the need for experts, scientists or researchers. On the other hand, I don’t see them as the harbingers of a utopian tomorrow free of class and oppression and inequalities in access to information.

This particular Library of Congress undertaking was already envisioned as a highly sophisticated project when I first began following it’s development while I was in graduate school over ten years ago. Obviously, technologies like [tag]flickr[/tag] and concepts like [tag]folksonomic tagging[/tag] have radically altered the intellectual landscape for archivists of image collections and I believe those alterations will pose many challenges, but the results promise to be spectacular.