The Library of Congress published on Flickr approximately 3,000 photos from two of their most popular image collections, "American Memory: Color photographs from the Great Depression" and The George Grantham Bain Collection. Matt Raymond, director of communications, in his blog post "My Friend Flickr" writes, "If all goes according to the plan, the project will help address at least two major challenges: how to ensure better and better access to our collections and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity."

This project is just a drop in the bucket. The Library of Congress has approximately 14 million prints, photographs, and other visual materials. Many of the photos are missing key caption information and Matt states tagging and commenting on these images "will benefit not only the community but also the collections themselves."

The results are astounding. After only 24 hours there have been 392,000 views on Flickr's photostream and 50,000 views of photos. All of the 3,000+ photos have been viewed, 420 have comments, 1,200 have been favorited.

You must check out The Commons on Flickr where these images are available to be view, tagged, and commented on. Not only are the wonderful to look at but who knows you might recognize somebody or some place and be able to add a comment.

For those librarians who are also responsible for your hospital's archive collection, Flickr might be a good way to make the collection more available.