The Library of Congress Pilot Project on Flickr

Announced yesterday, The Library of Congress has uploaded more than 3,000 historical photographs to Flickr, the online photo sharing website. These are shared under a new No known Copyright Restrictions category, which means that the library is not the intellectual property owner. There are two possibilities:

1. There was a copyright and it was not renewed
2. The image is from a late 19th or early 20th century collection for which there is no evidence of any rights holder

The aim of the project is to invite us, the public, to tag the photographs, thus categorising them and making them searchable. Clever, eh?

There are two collections: 1930s-40s in Color; and News in the 1910s.