Magic Studio

It’s old news now – over a week since the original announcement on the Library of Congress blog – but we’re excited about the partnership between the LoC and Flickr.

It’s not just the fact that this pilot project is bringing 3000 of the 14 million photographic images to a new public LoC Flickr page.

The licencing approach is novel and fresh. They’re using out-of-copyright images that can be used by anyone with no restrictions, and have introduced a new ‘No known copyright restrictions’ system for these images. They’re calling it ‘The Commons’. Or, as they say:

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.

This is music to our ears – and exactly the principle around which we’re basing our Magic Studio Gateway service for museums, libraries and archives.

The LoC and Flickr are asking the public to tag and comment on the images, with the intention of feeding that back into their catalogue to improve their metadata.

We’d also like to see that philosophy flipped around – what if that social tagging can also be used to drive greater educational value for the collections – and get them straight into the classroom?

Next step for us is to look how we can extend our existing work with the Flickr content API to also incorporate LoC results into our Magic Studio federated search – dynamically pulling these amazing collections into toolkits to build interactive educational resources.

Wouldn’t that be something?