Flickr Commons

The Library of Congress Pilot Project

The Library of Congress has a Prints and Photographs Online Catalog comprised of over 1 million images (and growing) that have been available online for over 10 years.

Back in June of 2007, we began our first collaboration with a civic institution to facilitate giving people a voice in describing the content of a publicly-held photography collection.

The key goals of this pilot project are to firstly give you a taste of the hidden treasures in the huge Library of Congress collection, and secondly to how your input of a tag or two can make the collection even richer.

You’re invited to help describe photographs in the Library of Congress’ collection on Flickr, by adding tags or leaving comments.*

*Any Flickr member is able to add tags or comment on these collections. If you’re a dork about it, shame on you. This is for the good of humanity, dude!!

I’m very excited about this and will be participating. Just look at all that good old-fashioned well-formed library data in each photo’s description…

However, I think there’s a missed opportunity here to leverage some of the extra power in having many people tag.

At Flickr’s sister site, del.icio.us, we’ve seen wonderful growth and understanding around how communities of users tag collectively. They’re not necessarily collaborating, which is why del.icio.us holds some special properties we do not see in the tagging at Flickr. However, I think Flickr should expose the identities/usernames along with the tags associated with a photo. Most photos are only tagged by the owner – it’s a safe assumption that this will continue to occur into the future. However, when the tagger is NOT the owner/uploader of the photo, this information is currently lost and not passed along in the Flickr interface.

Please, Flickr, expose the ‘who’ part of the tagging triumvirate (see last paragraph of Vander Wal’s definition). Especially now that we’ll have such rich data around our collective history.

This is still a strong belief the three tenets of a folksonomy: 1) tag; 2) object being tagged; and 3) identity, are core to disambiguation of tag terms and provide for a rich understanding of the object being tagged.

Another interesting note about this pilot – this is the first time we’ve seen a distinction of ‘no known copyright’:

Can anyone use “no known copyright restrictions?”
For the time being on Flickr this new usage is being contained to the Library of Congress account. If the pilot works – or, when it works! – we’ll look to allow other interested cultural institutions the opportunity to extend the application of “no known restrictions” to their catalogues.

Hooray, Library of Congress + Flickr!

Tagging – anyone?

The happy meeting of folksonomy and authority records? Our first look into how these align “in the wild”? Where are the strengths and weaknesses in each? How can we improve on each – since we now have a fuller picture of how they relate… LibraryThing? Are you listening? Researchers – come and get it.

Simon writes:

This may be of interest to some: last month I created and deployed a custom web agent designed to recover full MarcXML authority records via http://authorities.loc.gov.

There are still some inaccuracies that appear to reflect problems on the original; until these issues can be resolved, I’m only making a limited release (bad authorities are worse than no authorities).

The current results are available in http://www.ibiblio.org/fred2.0

authorities – contains all authority records, broken down by heading tag (1XX). You can either fetch individual batches of records or download a tar file containing all batches.

Be careful when uncompressing these files, as although the compressed data only takes 637 MB, the compression ratio is around 15:1 (XML is not the world’s most compact encoding).

subjects-NFC.tgz – contains only subject headings.

Authority.app – is a little RubyCocoa application for viewing marc xml files.

Please let me know if you spot any problems.

Thanks,

Simon

From http://www.ibiblio.org/fred2.0/readme.pdf

Fred 2.0
Phase 1: Library Of Congress Authorities Files

Open Catalog Liberation Council, Provisional ALA
22nd December 2006
Dedication
Fred 2.0 is dedicated to the memory of
Frederick G. Kilgour (Jan. 6, 1914 – July 31, 2006)
Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus
School Of Information And Library Science
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

This phase of the project is dedicated to the men and women at the Library of Congress and outside, who have worked for the past 108 years to build these authorities, often in the face of technology seemingly designed to make the task as difficult as possible.

Summary

Using a custom agent, we were able to harvest 6.95 million authority records, using the publicly accessible interface to the Library of Congress authority files located at authorities.loc.gov.

Retrieved records have been converted into MarcXML.
Accented characters have been converted into NFC (Composed Normal Form).

Initial checks against authorities.loc.gov indicate that the retrieved data faithfully reflect that on the original system; however these checks are still only preliminary.

Cross checks against Classification Web have revealed some inconsistencies. For this reason, we are releasing these records for research purposes only. These data are not suitable for production use.