ResearchBuzz

Oh, such coolness — the Library of Congress recently announced that it’s teaming up with Flickr. According to the LOC blog post, “If all goes according to plan, the project will help address at least two major challenges: how to ensure better and better access to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity. In many senses, we are looking to enhance our metadata…”

(Flickr is actually working on a project to get the world generating metadata for publicly-held photograph collections — see The Commons at http://www.flickr.com/commons .)

The idea is that the Library of Congress now has its own Flickr page at http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/ . Photos are being posted there for users to tag, comment about, and provide more information on. Though there are literally millions of photos/prints/visual things in the LOC’s collections, the LOC page has launched with over 3,000 items.

The photographs cover a lot of ground but the LOC does have two sets of photos available — 1930s-1940s in Color and News in the 1910s. Just browsing through all the photographs finds all kinds of topics, from smokestacks to medals to cowboys to baseball players.

I was amazed at how many people have commented on these photographs. And get a load of the tag clouds. “Vintage”, as you might imagine, is a very popular tag.

If you want to search Flickr for just LOC content, you can use the search form at http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=&w=8623220%40N02 . I tried to use Yahoo Images to search the images by other parameters (like size,whether the image is in color or not, etc.) but I couldn’t figure out how to limit Yahoo Images results to a particular Flickr user.

The LOC has started a Web site devoted to information about its program to capture and preserve Web sites — what it calls “historically important” web sites. You can check it out at http://www.loc.gov/webcapture/.

As you’ll see when you first visit the site, the LOC has actually been active in Web capture and preservation since 2000, and has election Web sites for 2000, for 2002, and for the events of September 11.

If you take a look at the current project list, you’ll see that while there are several projects organized by date, there are several that are more thematic. Current projects include Election 2006, the Papal transition, Prints and Photographs Acquisitions, and “General Collections Archiving Pilot”, several months of collecting sites that are not around a specific theme. Nerds might want to check out the technical information page, which not only describes some of the open source tools the LOC is using but announces that the LOC is developing a tool that will be made available as open source in “late 2006.”

It might seem counterintuitive that the Library of Congress is putting so much effort into Web archiving when there’s a perfectly good Internet Archive which has archived literally tens of billions of Web pages. But with both the amount of material to be archived, and the way that this material can be archived (all the different project lines the LOC is coming up with) the more the merrier.

I am a little concerned — this is going to sound incredibly lowbrow — I am a little concerned that some of the popular culture aspects of the Internet are going to be missed with these preservation programs. Of course, there are some things that for the good of humanity should probably be missed and kept missing. But on the other hand the Internet has been evolving now for over ten years, and there are Web sites that one could argue were either pivotal in the development or showed the evolution of the Internet as a power.

For example, the Blair Witch Project site. Nowadays everybody talks about viral marketing and buzz and all that. The Blair Witch Project site was one of the first Web sites to help build buzz about a project. Some of the early “Soap Opera” type sites, like The Spot. Early corporate sites, like Amazon back when it had a TBBS interface. Or more recently the guy that sold advertising by the pixel on a Web site. Things that point out and play up why things have changed, or when they changed, or how they changed — but don’t fit neatly into a project template.

Maybe we’ll have to wait until 2025 when college students are doing their theses on “Pivotal Events In the Early Development of the Internet” and start putting together these kinds of collections…