Photo by George

The Commons

Your opportunity to contribute to describing the world's public photo collections.

The Commons Your opportunity to contribute to describing the world's public photo collections.

Welcome!

Back in June of 2007, we began our first collaboration with a civic institution to facilitate giving people a voice in describing the content of a publicly-held photography collection, The Library of Congress. The pilot project we created together launched on January 16, 2008. (More info on the pilot.)

The key goals of The Commons are to firstly give you a taste of the hidden treasures in the world's public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer.

You're invited to help describe the photographs you discover in The Commons on Flickr, either by adding tags or leaving comments.*

Members of The Commons

The Powerhouse Museum NEW

400 items | Rights Statement

The Powerhouse Museum has selected its Tyrrell Collection, which consists of 7903 glass plate negatives from the studios of Charles Kerry (1857-1928) and Henry King (1855-1923), providing an important record of city and country life in Australia around the turn of the 20th Century. Joined April 5, 2008

The Library of Congress

3,565 items | Rights Statement

Our flagship Commons partner, The Library of Congress has a Prints and Photographs Online Catalog comprised of over 1 million images (and growing) that have been available online for over 10 years. The pilot was a great success, and has even helped The Library update over 70 of its catalogue records as a direct result of input from Flickr members! Joined January 16, 2008.

What do you see in this photograph? Add a tag

1930s-40s in Color

Photographers working for the U.S. government's Farm Security Administration (FSA) and later the Office of War Information (OWI) captured life across the United States, including Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.

Explore images of rural areas and farm labor, as well as aspects of World War II mobilization, including factories, railroads, aviation training, and women working between 1939 and 1944.

Browse the FSA/OWI Color Collection

How would you describe what's in this photo? Add a tag

News in the 1910s

Walk back in time through the eyes of photographers who worked for the Bain News Service.

Enjoy this set of 1,500 photographs from a collection containing almost 40,000 glass negatives made ca. 1900-1920. The photographs document sports events, theater, celebrities, crime, strikes, disasters, and political activities, with a special emphasis on life in New York City.

Visit the Bain Collection on Flickr

*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!!

More about The Commons

A new way to share photos on Flickr

The Commons was launched on January 16 2008, when we released our pilot project in partnership with The Library of Congress. Both Flickr and the Library were overwhelmed by the positive response to the project! Thank you!

Can anyone use "no known copyright restrictions?"

This new rights statement is being contained to the institutions participating in The Commons, at the account level. It is a requirement for participation in the program that institutions may rightly claim "no known copyright restrictions" on the content they share.

How can I get involved?

The best way to get involved is to contribute some tags to the photos provided by the institutions participating in The Commons! If we can show that this is a useful, productive endeavour, we can expand the program to include all sorts of collections!

I work for a museum or library that already has a Flickr account. How can we be part of The Commons?

We are still gauging demand in the program. If you could let us know you're interested by sending an email to flickr-commons [at] yahoo-inc.com, we'll go from there.

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