flickr has recently started “the commons” project, in colaboration with the US “Library of Congress”. Subtitled “your opportunity to contribute to describing the world’s public photo collections”, they ask users to help enrich the pictures with tags, descriptions and comments. the pictures were taken from the beginning of the century through the 40s and their themes spread accross several subjects, from ww2, to sports, railroads and aviation, women training, celebrities, political activities, world news, life in ny…

These beautiful, historic pictures from the Library represent materials for which the Library is not the intellectual property owner. Flickr is working with the Library of Congress to provide an appropriate statement for these materials. It’s called “no known copyright restrictions.”

Hopefully, this pilot can be used as a model that other cultural institutions would pick up, to share and redistribute the myriad collections held by cultural heritage institutions all over the world. (from the commons page)

now wouldn’t that be nice?

“Native Quarter, Shanghai” in the picture, also from the collection.