Nisimasa, a European network of young film professionals, students and enthusiasts for European cinema, devoted their March edition of their online magazine to the topic Film Archives. According to chief editor Caroline Fournier, young film professionals don’t really know much about this topic and are closed off because of bad access. At the same time archives have great potential to contribute to their future work through reuse of the material.

“These images can become part of the artistic process, in a society which wants to recycle its heritage, which likes to reuse old images in order to realise something new”

There are interesting initiatives going on to give better access the material. Film Archives Online for example gives free access to catalogue information of film archives from all over Europe, via a multi-lingual web portal. At the Moving Images Archive you can view around 2000 films from the Prelinger Archives. But, do these facilitate young filmmakers in reusing the archives enough? What do young filmmakers expect from the archives? How can cultural heritage contribute to their work and how would they like to have access? If you have an opinion on this topic, please comment.

The Library of Congress and Flickr together announced a pilot to put a selection of the photo collection of the LOC on Flickr. The community will tag. Will it also capture the imagination of other institutions?

Out of some 14 million prints, photographs and other visual materials at the Library of Congress, more than 3000 photos from two of the most popular collections are being made available on the new Flickr page. Including only images for which no copyright restrictions are known to exist.

The Library of Congress is not the first putting their archive on Flickr to gain more visibility and accessibility. A lot of prominant museums already did, like the Brooklyn Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Powerhouse Museum and the Smithsonian American Art Museum & the Renwick Museum. They all put their collection in a place where people actually spend more time than on the website of the museum itself.

The Commons
So, would this grand announcement be just a clever marketing trick to get the attention of the internet savvy youth? Maybe. But The Library of Congres doesn’t want to be just another collection on Flickr. They officially partnered with Flickr to move the Flickr community to tag the photo’s and baptised the pilot “The Commons”.

Their goal is to increase exposure to the collections and to facilitate the collection of general knowledge with the hope that this information can feed back into the catalogues, making them richer and easier to search. With this pilot the Library of Congress embraces the “power of the web”, as we can read on their blog:

We’re also very excited that, as part of this pilot, Flickr has created a new publication model for publicly held photographic collections called “The Commons.” Flickr hopes—as do we—that the project will eventually capture the imagination and involvement of other public institutions, as well. From the Library’s perspective, this pilot project is a statement about the power of the Web and user communities to help people better acquire information, knowledge and—most importantly—wisdom.

I hope that this pilot will get the attention of other institutions and encourage them to explore the rules of the web more profoundly. If you take a look at the collection already tagged it is impressive to see that some objects already have 25 tags. Somebody got payed to do this?

For the press release of the Library of Congress pilot on Flickr click here.