Summary

  • The Library of Congress reported a $24.95 annual Flickr Pro account expense, alongside 15–20 hours a week of staff work on community activity.
  • By August 2008, verified contributions had enriched more than 500 catalogue records; those corrections were also sent back to Flickr.

The account bill was almost comically small. In 2008, the Library of Congress paid $24.95 for a Flickr Pro account with unlimited photo uploads. For that price, its old photographs acquired a lively gathering of people who recognised places, deciphered names and remembered things the catalogue had never been told.

Then somebody had to check their homework.

A photograph labelled simply “Reid Funeral” gained an identity: the crowd outside the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York for the funeral of Whitelaw Reid, the American ambassador to Great Britain. A picture of the Sylvia Sweets Tea Room drew an account from the restaurant owner’s family. The Library’s December 2008 report announcement described both kinds of reward: better identification and the personal history that made an image feel inhabited again.

The audience was already over there

The pilot opened on 16 January 2008. Its first collections paired Bain news photographs with sparse descriptions and FSA/OWI colour photographs that already had some subject indexing. The Library had digitised pictures and catalogue information. Flickr had people accustomed to looking, tagging and talking about pictures. Putting the two together offered a shorter route to those people than hoping they would discover the Library’s own site.

The October 2008 project report counted 67,176 community tags and 7,166 comments by late October. Those were different kinds of contributions. A label could make a photograph easier to find; a comment could supply the newspaper reference, remembered address or fuller name needed to explain it. A family recollection could be worth reading in the conversation even when it did not belong in a compact catalogue entry.

The distinction mattered at the librarian’s desk. Staff verified corrections and additions before incorporating them into the Prints and Photographs Online Catalog. By August, more than 500 records had been enriched, with the Flickr Commons project credited as the source. Corrected records then travelled back to Flickr so the two descriptions could stay aligned.

The receipt omitted the librarians

The $24.95 was the reported annual external expenditure. The labour account was considerably more substantial. One staff member, or a backup, spent an average of 15–20 hours a week reviewing and verifying sources, deciding what belonged in the catalogue, answering questions and handling requests to add pictures to groups. Updating a source catalogue record took about ten minutes per photograph. Screening the account for spam and obscenity was another reported task, at roughly two hours a week.

Useful contributions were making work. That was part of the success. The report says staff fitted the project around existing priorities and adjusted deadlines; nobody was assigned to it full time. The arrangement also drew on images already digitised and expertise already inside the institution. The little subscription receipt sat on top of a much larger working library.

The project’s FAQ asks contributors to explain how they know what they know, preferably with a publication, page number or URL. That request gives the enthusiastic stranger a practical way to help the next person in the chain. A well-supported identification arrives with some of its checking already done.

Flickr gave the photographs company. The Library supplied the work that let a useful remark become part of the record. By December, the institution was reporting many more contributions waiting to be checked and added. The bargain account had found the audience; the queue on the desk measured the next commitment.