Library of Congress Flickr Images

One of the librarians at Faulk Central Library enjoys reading Mental Floss (available at Central and Ruiz), a magazine for people who love learning new and interesting facts. The kind of stuff that can make you a good conversationalist at your next dinner party. She stumbled across a post about the Library of Congress’ Flickr page and shares it with us in today’s blog.

For those of you unfamiliar with Flickr, it is a free photo-sharing website where anyone with a digital camera or scanner can share their photos with the world (or just your friends if you are feeling sheepish). I have a Flickr account and many of my friends do as well. It’s a great way to keep in touch and share important memories with the people who are closest to you but not necessarily right next door.

Flickr offers a huge collection of images for your viewing pleasure. Some are beautiful, some are bizarre and some are just not that interesting unless you are in the photo; but I have yet to see a better example of Flickr in action than the Library of Congress’ Flickr account. The Flickr page is a project of the Prints and Photographs Division which houses 14 million of the Library's pictures. One of the goals of the project is to share some of the Library’s amazing collections with people who are interested in images and history but may not visit the Library’s own website.

As of right now there are only two collections of photos being featured on the page and they are truly breathtaking. My favorite is the 1930s-40s in Color. True to its name, this collection showcases over 1600 photos from the Great Depression and World War II eras and all images are in color. It is fascinating to see color images of a time in history that most of us think of in black and white, and in such vivid detail. Also, because Flick allows visitors to leave comments and create tags you can become an active participant of the project. The Library of Congress is encouraging that visitors add comments and tags to the images, especially those images with an incomplete history. According to the LOC Blog the Library of Congress’ account has already received about 1.1 million views.

To learn more about the project you can read the FAQ page or visit the main webpage of the Prints and Photographs Division. If you would like to learn more about Flickr or how to locate images online take a look at the Image Locator from the Austin Public Library’s Research Guides collection.