First on the roster; the use of flickr commons by libraries and archives. I do believe the Library of Congress released images here a while back and now the New York Public Library has done so as well. From this boingboing mention, it seem really cool that large institutions are releasing their images to the world. Taken from a blog from the NY library:
About a year ago Flickr launched the Flickr Commons, a project dedicated to sharing and describing the public photo collections of the world's leading cultural heritage institutions. Starting this past January with The Library of Congress, and continuing with places such as The Smithsonian Institution, The Brooklyn Museum, The National Maritime Museum, The National Library of New Zealand, the Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands and numerous others, the Commons has grown steadily over the past year into a truly remarkable public photography resourceI mean what isn't awesome about cyanotypes of algae? I think this is a brilliant use of the interwebz and all this web 2.0 jazz we hear about over and over. This is designed to encourage use and description of the images, but this also provides another method of marketing (yes I did say that!) for these institutions in showing off some of the rich collections they hold.
A quick search of flickr did not show any loads from the LAC, which is too bad, so I hope it is on the horizon. I did come across an image of one workstation I used in the Staff Resource Centre in someone's photostream....
Next up; I really goofed on this one as I saw it posted on boing boing and it didn't even register that this was an ARCHIVE. D'oh. The LIFE magazine photo archive is now posted up on Google image search (click here to scope it out). I am quite sorry I came late to this magazine as I adore the photographs, and when the magazine folded, I was very upset. Now, all can access these images. As indicated in the spellbound blog, to search only the LIFE images, you type in source:LIFE as one of the search terms. The images are fascinating as it seems like you get far more shots than what would have appeared in the finished story. I looked up fashion and then clicked dresses from one linked story about Hermes trompe l'oeil dresses from 1952, and there are easily half a dozen more variations on each shot. Just fascinating.
My only quibble from this is I would love to have the stories there as well to know the context for the images as they would have been in the magazine. But this is another whole project full of copyrights and other nonsense that I'll stay away from. Do note that this project is different from the aforementioned flickr commons one where tagging and interaction is encouraged. Google has already come up with all the links, tags, and organization for this giant set of images. I did note in looking at these dresses, there was only about say ten similar images indicated by Google, but there were far more related images in my search...I thought I had more to share but the pickings have been slim and I haven't been anxiously hunting down the stories as a good blogger should. So enjoy this last five minutes of 2008!
Boing boing Gadgets just informed me that 2009 is the International Year of Natural Fibres so have a good one!
