About two or three weeks ago Flickr, the photograph hosting service/experiment announced that it had teamed up with the Library of Congress. See it in action at Flickr Commons. What this essentially means is that, on a trial basis, Flickr users will be able to tag digitized photographs from the collections of the Library of Congress in much the same way they would tag a friend's snapshot or someone's vacation pictures.
This is huge to me for a few reasons. This past fall I spend a considerable amount of time writing a thesis about how social tagging, of the type utilized on Flickr, YouTube, and de.lic.ious among other places could be a formidable tool in efforts to provide better access to digitized museum collections. I'm cutting out a ton of details, but basically the problem is that museum cataloging has, for the longest time, been approached in a manner that is essentially borrowed from libraries. However the inherent "value" of an artwork or an artifact is one's personal connection to it and its context within the greater scheme of (art) history. This is a context that traditional cataloging rarely provides. But tagging, on the other hand, allows for far greater flexibility and draws from a wider pool of communal knowledge and insight. Its something worth exploring. My main focus at the time was Steve.Museum but given my current line of work (archives) its thrilling to see this attempted on such a scale, and with the backing of the major players in both areas.
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