Civic Institution Reaches Out To Flickr

If there’s anything we’ve learned from brands exploiting YouTube, it’s that user-generated content is synonymous with unpaid interns. Flickr takes a page from Wikipedia’s work-for-nothing-but-a-sense-of-worth book and gambles a long-term partnership on it.

When The Library of Congress determined it needed 1,500 photographs (sans copyrights) from 2 of their most popular collections tagged, they knew they couldn’t do it solo. With over 20 million unique tags to properly record, archive and search galleries of images, Flickr proved to be a perfect fit. Enter The Commons project.

Pending results, Flickr hopes other departments will take them up on similar offers. Turns out there might be money in government contracts. Next up, the Department of Homeland security needs you to tag patriot profiles?

The Commons

-Contributed by Katie Sherman