For the Common Good: 

The Library of Congress 

Flickr Pilot Project 

Report Summary 

October 30, 2008 

Michelle Springer, Beth Dulabahn, Phil Michel, Barbara Natanson, David Reser, 

David Woodward, and Helena Zinkham 
Table of Contents 

Overview..................................................................................................................................... 3 

Background................................................................................................................................. 3 

Outcomes .................................................................................................................................... 4

5

6

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Comments, Tags, and Notes....................................................................................................... 

Recommendations....................................................................................................................... 

Key Links for More Information ................................................................................................ 

Note: The full report, “For the Common Good: The Library of Congress Flickr Pilot” is 

available on request from flickrpilot@loc.gov. 

Cover photo: “Woman aircraft worker, Vega Aircraft Corporation, Burbank, Calif. Shown checking electrical 

assemblies.” Photograph by David Bransby, June 1942. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information 

Collection, http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/2179930812. 

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Overview 

On January 16, 2008, the Library of Congress launched a pilot project on Flickr, the popular 

photosharing Web site. We invited the public to tag and describe two sets of approximately 

3,000 historic photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress. The Flickr 

community welcomed us warmly. By asking people for help and by offering broad public 

opportunity for interaction with collections, the Library struck a chord that fits well with Web 

2.0 communities. In the first 24 hours after launch, Flickr reported 1.1 million total views on our 

account, with 3.6 million views a week later. In mid-March we began to load an additional 50 

photos each Friday, with the result that more than 4,000 photos are now in the account. Today, 

Library of Congress (LC) photos on Flickr are averaging approximately 500,000 views a month 

and have surpassed the 10 million mark in total views. 

The initial collections feature 1,600 color photographs showing the Great Depression and the 

World War II home front (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection 

or FSA/OWI) and 1,500 black-and-white news photos from the early 1900s (George Grantham 

Bain News Service Collection or Bain). These photos were already digitized and on the Library’s 

Web site and were known to be popular. They were also good candidates for additional research 

and description because, as often happens with valuable old photographs, many of the images 

had arrived at the Library with sparse caption information. 

The Library has received an enormous amount of positive feedback from within Flickr, from the 

traditional press, and from the Web 2.0 community at large. Public reaction to the pilot from a 

broad array of users made it clear that the existence of these freely available digital materials was 

a welcome surprise. As suspected, many people have long been unaware of the rich historical 

and cultural resources available through libraries. 

 

Background 

Based on a desire to act quickly and minimize the IT resources required for the pilot, the 

Library’s project team decided to look at popular social media sites that already had wellestablished mechanisms for user-contributed content. Flickr.com, where members are both 

passionate about sharing photographs and well versed in tagging, emerged as the most suitable 

candidate. It soon became apparent, however, that the licensing statement options Flickr 

provided were not appropriate to describe the copyright status of the material. Discussions with 

Flickr management ensued and resulted in the “No known copyright restrictions” statement 

programmed to appear on the Library’s Flickr account. Thus began a collaboration that inspired 

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Flickr to launch a new initiative called The Commons (www.flickr.com/commons) and invite 

cultural heritage organizations to participate. Following the Library’s lead, ten more museums 

and libraries from six nations have already joined The Commons and are sharing selections from 

their photo archives and inviting the public to contribute information within this specially 

designated Flickr space. 

No staff members worked full time on this project. The majority of effort expended on the pilot 

occurred prior to the public launch of the Library’s Flickr account as a one-time cost, including 

approximately 222 hours of technical programming work. Ongoing costs to moderate the 

account and add new images once a week came to 1 FTE. Participating more actively and 

keeping up with the flood of new information about the photographs would require additional 

resources. For additional information, see the Background section of the full report. 

Outcomes 

We entered the pilot not entirely knowing what to expect, and we were pleasantly surprised on a 

number of fronts. News of the project flew across the blogosphere. We were soon approached 

by a number of other cultural heritage institutions desiring to launch similar efforts. An 

outpouring of appreciation flowed into Flickr and the Library’s blog; even damaged, unretouched photos have been viewed with interest and often reverence. The Flickr community has 

rallied to our call for assistance with a surprising level of engagement, and the quality of “history 

detective” work has been excellent. Following our weekly upload of photos, avid contributors 

add new tags and comments with surprising speed. Finally, the images we placed on Flickr have 

greater weight in search engine results compared to their counterparts on the loc.gov Web site. A 

Google search for the baseball player “Germany Schaefer,” produces the LC Flickr account 

photo1

 as one of the top 5 results on the first Google page; the loc.gov version of the same photo 

does not appear until the 5th page of search results. 

The following statistics attest to the popularity and impact of the pilot. As of October 23, 2008, 

there have been: 

• 10.4 million views of the photos on Flickr. 

• 79% of the 4,615 photos have been made a “favorite” (i.e., are incorporated into personal 

Flickr collections). 

• More than 15,000 Flickr members have chosen to make the Library of Congress a 

“contact,” creating a photostream of Library images on their own accounts. 

 

1 http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/2162646403/. 

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• 7,166 comments were left on 2,873 photos by 2,562 unique Flickr accounts. 

• 67,176 tags were added by 2,518 unique Flickr accounts. 

• 4,548 of the 4,615 photos have at least one community-provided tag. 

• Less than 25 instances of user-generated content were removed as inappropriate. 

• More than 500 Prints and Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC) records have been 

enhanced with new information provided by the Flickr Community. 

Between January and May 2008, the Library saw an increase in hits at its own Web site. For 

Bain images placed on Flickr, views/downloads rose approximately 60% for the period JanuaryMay 2008, compared to the same time period in 2007. Views/downloads of FSA/OWI image 

files placed on Flickr rose approximately 13%. Average monthly visits to all PPOC Web pages 

rose 20% over the five-month period of January-May 2008, compared to the same period in 

2007. For additional information, see the Outcomes section in the full report. 

Comments, Tags, and Notes 

Flickr provides three ways for people to add information to posted photos: free-form comments, 

tags, and notes applied to the pictures themselves. Comments have turned out to be very 

interesting and informative. Comments allow viewers to reminisce and share knowledge, 

increasing the sense of ownership or stewardship that people feel for that content. Often drawing 

on personal histories, Flickr members have made connections between the past and the present, 

including memories of farming practices, grandparents’ lives, women’s roles in World War II, 

and the changing landscape of local neighborhoods. Sometimes commenters have identified the 

precise locations of photos and posted pictures of the landscapes as they appear today. (For links 

and samples of the various types of interactions occurring in comments, notes, and tags, see 

Appendix A: Examples of Flickr Interactions, in the full report.) 

 

Flickr members also have offered corrections and additions by identifying locations, events, 

individuals, and precise dates. This data is often supported by accompanying links to articles 

from the New York Times archive, Wikipedia, and subject-specialized Web sites. After 

verification by Library staff, information provided by the Flickr community is incorporated into 

our catalog records. For example, as a result of this project, a photo once simply captioned, 

“Reid Funeral”’

2

 is now more fully described with the note: “Photo shows the crowd gathered 

outside of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine during New York City funeral of Whitelaw Reid, 

American Ambassador to Great Britain. (Source: Flickr Commons project, 2008).” 

 

2 http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/2515741281/. 

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Within Flickr, tags can be searched separately from the words in photo descriptions. Popular 

concepts like “Rosie the Riveter” (added to 77 of the FSA/OWI photos) provide another avenue 

for retrieval beyond the Library’s controlled vocabulary terms of “Women—employment” and 

“World War, 1939-1945.” To determine the types of tags that were being added to images, we 

analyzed the tags in a sample set of 50 Bain and 50 FSA/OWI photos. Interestingly, for the 

FSA/OWI sample set, which has fairly full bibliographic information, almost 80% of the tags 

were either words directly copied from the Library-provided record or were words for items seen 

in the images. The Bain sample set, for which we had minimal identifying information, inspired 

more diverse tagging including personal commentary, place names, and tags in multiple 

languages, in addition to the repetition of LC-provided information. 

Notes (annotations left directly on the photos) have some utility, such as pointing out specific 

persons in a crowd or deciphering the words on a sign or placard. Notes are also a means of 

adding graffiti-type messages and smart-aleck humor to the images, which is a cause for some 

concern among Flickr members and Library staff. For additional information, see the section 

Gaining a Better Understanding of Social Tagging and Community Input in the full report. 

Recommendations 

Performance measures documented in the full report illustrate how the project can contribute to 

achieving the objectives and desired outcomes of the Library’s strategic goals. The Flickr project 

increases awareness of the Library and its collections; sparks creative interaction with 

collections; provides LC staff with experience with social tagging and Web 2.0 community 

input; and allows the Library to provide leadership to cultural heritage and government 

communities. The specific strategic goals are listed in Appendix B in the full report. 

 

The Flickr Pilot project team recommends that the Library of Congress continue to participate in 

The Commons and explore other Web 2.0 communities. Creating a virtual reference center and 

adding more collections to Flickr are among the possible next steps. For additional information 

on these and other options, see the Recommendations section in the full report. 

Key Links for More Information 

• The Commons http://www.flickr.com/commons/

• Library of Congress Photos on Flickr: Frequently Asked Questions 

http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/flickr_pilot_faq.html 

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• Library of Congress Photos on Flickr (announcing the pilot and linked off the Library’s 

Home page) http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/flickr_pilot.html

• The Library of Congress Profile on Flickr 

http://www.flickr.com/people/library_of_congress/

• The Library of Congress Flickr Account 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress. 

Figure 1. Midnight Sun, Bell Sound, Norway, approximately 1900. Photochrom Print Collection.3

 

 

3 http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppmsc.06255

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