3000 Photos for the Tagging in Flickr’s Commons...

Now THAT'S what I like to see. This article from Library Journal explains briefly how the US Library of Congress has submitted upwards of 3000 photos for which no copyright restrictions are known (Woah... risky.) to flickr in the hopes that users will swarm in and tag them all, using the power of Web 2.0 democratic scholarship (new word possibility: "democrolarship"?) to add value to the photos and give them some meaning and organization.

At the very least, all these Web 2.0 tools make it easy, fun and tempting for everyone and anyone to start dumping mass amounts of their collections into the public arena where at least it's more accessible. Even the tools that have been online and technically free and open for years already (like library catalogs or government databases) are being made more "crawl-able" and/or pushed into view with RSS feeds and the like.

He who has nothing and wants something is less frustrated than he who has something and wants more.
Eric Hoffer (1902-1983), True Believer or Theory of Leisure Class

Check out the photos at flickr's "The Commons".