Wow. It's been a while since I've been excited about something a company is doing so perhaps I'm a little overly giddy but Flickr's partnership with the (US) Library of Congress is just so cool. This joint project, known as The Commons, seeks to have acquire richer descriptions and information for photographs in the Library of Congress' photograph collection.

You're invited to help describe photographs in the Library of Congress' collection on Flickr, by adding tags or leaving comments.*

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.

Essentially the Library of Congress is going to throw historical photographs from their collection into their Flickr account. We, volunteers will help catalog/identify/describe those photographs by adding appropriate tags and comments. This is a very cool project that allows community involvement, by using new technology in the process of documenting history the preceded us. Meaning, yes we can make and document history and we do everyday with our Flickr accounts but we can also record and describe historical photographs that predated us. We can make historical photographs more relevant and more easily found by increasing the knowledge and information associated with them.

I've been without a Flickr pro account for nearly a year because I haven't needed the space or any of the pro bells or whistles. Supporting projects and initiatives like this totally makes me want to get a pro account again just to support Flickr.

I totally love the openness of this project. I also love Flickr's note about being involvement with this project:

Any Flickr member is able to add tags or comment on these collections. If you're a dork about it, shame on you. This is for the good of humanity, dude!!