Archived Images Find Renewed Life Online

The internet is awash with images.  Many professional photographers see this explosion of access as a devaluation of the art form, but most revel in the leveling of the playing field.  Images from the dozens of popular photo sharing sites are tagged, ranked and categorized in a mostly democratic system.  For Wikipedia and other educationally centered sites, the encyclopedic value of these photos has improved dramatically with time.

The legal status of images has stifled their appearance online, but as national archives from around the world recognize the cultural significance of their holdings, they are more prone to release them.  A recent example is the uploading of over 100,000 images from the German Federal Archive to Wikipedia.  A few months ago Life Magazine collaborated with Google to release their collection and the Library of Congress releases about 50 images per week to their Flickr pool of over 5,000 images.  For the holders of image databases the internet can serve as a resource for tagging and identifying details that a specialized team would take months or even years to go through.  This massive crowd sourcing improves as the photos reappear online, but many organizations are tentative to release their collections without a proven benefit.  The New York Times discusses the case of the German Federal Archive:

The archive’s motives were not entirely selfless; it hopes to harness the Wikipedia editors to improve the cataloging of the photographs, said Oliver Sander, who is responsible for the collection at the archive. There are 58,000 people in these photographs who lack an ID number assigned by the German library, and the archive would like Wikipedia editors to help identify who is in these photographs and add these codes. “Unfortunately, we don’t have the capacity to implement this with our list of people,” Dr. Sander said. “Maybe Wikipedia members could add this ID to our list. That was the first benefit from Wikipedia.”  Thus far, 29,000 photographs of people have been so coded, Dr. Sander said.

[via NYT: Historical Photos in Web Archives Gain Vivid New Lives]
[Library of Congress image of suffrage women from 1913 via Flickr]