Can 23 million views be wrong?
I overlooked an important anniversary–January 16 was the two-year anniversary of the Library of Congress starting to post images on Flickr. As Michelle Springer wrote in her guest post on the LOC blog:
As of today, there have been more than 23 million views of the images and more than 27,700 Flickr community members call us a contact. In two years, we have loaded more than 8,000 images in two collections (historic photographs and historic newspapers) in 11 sets on diverse topics—baseball, women’s rights, and Abraham Lincoln, to name a few. Over a thousand records in the Prints and Photographs online catalog have been enhanced with information from the Flickr Commons community. More accurate and detailed information in our catalog, with links to interesting histories, makes the pictures not only easier to find but easier to understand. The interactions with our photos are remarkably varied-ranging from the practical (corrected spellings and dates) to the imaginative. Energy for volunteering information continues to run high.
Just in time for the birthday, there’s a new Library of Congress set on Flickr, titled “Great Comments, THANK YOU!” It points to images that generated a variety of interesting comments.
Wow. One in eight of the images posted has resulted in additions or corrections to the descriptive information. And before someone chimes in saying that we can’t update our descriptions willy-nilly based on random user comments, let me say that I am completely confident that the LOC responsibly verifies the information they receive before they change information in the catalog. Just take a look at some of the exchanges in the comments of the images highlighted in the new LOC set and you’ll see this at work.
Congratulations, Library of Congress, on two wonderful years of making your collections more accessible and thank you for being a role model for smaller archives and libraries to follow in using social media!
Crowdsourcing, Flickr | Kate T. | 
January 25, 2010 8:57 am
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By Jennifer, January 25, 2010 @ 10:19 am
They do verify the information–most definitely. I recall a panel discussion with someone from the LOC speaking on how they deal with user comments at the 2008 SAA conference in SF. Put your slides+talk online whoever you are!
By Rob, January 25, 2010 @ 11:26 am
Let’s not forget the beauty of crowdsourcing is that the good information floats to the top. If you post something wrong, it usually WILL get corrected. If you post something right, usually others will back you up. Plus, some information can be easily verified. A classic case is the picture of a factory on the LOC Flickr stream that had only one informational tidbri. They thought it might be in Massachusetts. Flickr users gave the name of the town where it was located, the name of the factory and its exact location within the city. All of this could be immediately verified without too much trouble.
In my eyes, the LOC Flickr project is crowdsourcing at its best.
By Helena Zinkham, January 29, 2010 @ 2:31 pm
I enjoyed talking about the Flickr project at the SAA 2008 conference, but in looking back at my talk there was only a brief reference to verifying information– “Staff also read comments to find, verify, and incorporate new information about the photos and comment on the outcome. This takes 15-20 hours/week.”
We do still verify information, either by following and assessing the links provided within the comments, or checking our own collections and reference sources. Here’s a recent example with a portrait of J.B. Joel–a puzzle based on how young he appeared in a 1912 photo, http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/4195203404
” Barbara (LOC P&P) says:
I have searched in vain for another photo in Library of Congress collections to try to confirm that this is Jack Barnato Joel. It seems quite possible that this is Bain’s copy of an earlier photograph, which would explain the youthful appearance, and some of the facial characteristics look similar to (though perhaps a bit more debonair than!) the image swanq pointed to at http://www.tbheritage.com/Breeders/SABreeding/SABree ders.html.”
A Joel relative later resolved things.
By Kate T., January 30, 2010 @ 4:23 pm
You don’t need 23 million views to be a success. Check out this post at “A Repository for Bottled Monsters,” the unofficial blog of the National Museum of Health and Medicine (http://bottledmonsters.blogspot.com/2010/01/why-we-do-this.html):
“Today we got an email in the archives from a man in California who found pictures of his mother, a World War 2 nurse, on our Flickr page. His mother’s 87th birthday is coming soon and he wants to print one of the photos for her. He said he’s not sure she knows these photos exist.
So many of our images have no or very little information, but in this case his mother’s name was spelled out in the caption to all four!!! photos of her. I have often said to myself, as I am posting this kind of detail, that someone is going to be trolling the internet, looking for their mom or dad, and may very well find one of the things we’ve tossed up there.
It’s exactly this reason that we do what we do, with the hope that we’re the connection between today and yesterday. Have I said I love my job?”