Case Summary

In January 2008, the Library of Congress began an initiative to publicly share over 3,000 photos in its collection through Flickr in an effort to enrich the collection with public identifications and descriptions. The Library of Congress has also invited other cultural heritage institutions to join in making photo collections more accessible. Nine months after its inception, the initiative's Flickr page has logged over 10 million total views and averages 500,000 views per month.

Business Challenge

Over time, the Library of Congress has acquired thousands of photos that arrive with sparse caption information and in need of research, identification, and description. LOC needed a way to enrich their photo collection without undertaking costly, time-consuming staff research.

Approach Taken

LOC opened an account with photo sharing site Flickr to share the photos and solicit comments, descriptions, and tags (to organize the photos). The initial collections featured 1,600 color photographs showing the Great Depression and the World War II home front and 1,500 black-and-white news photos from the early 1900s. 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.

Results Achieved

LOC now loads an additional 50 photos each Friday, and the account now totals more than 5,200 photos. Today, LOC photos on Flickr are averaging approximately 500,000 views a month and have surpassed the 10 million mark in total views.

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.

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.
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.