No one saw this coming.
The plan was simple enough. The Library of Congress teamed with Flickr for a pilot project called The Commons, which basically consisted of LOC opening a Flickr account and uploading a little over 3,000 images (the LOC houses 14 million prints, photographs and other visual materials!)
The goal was to address two of the major challenges the library faces:
1. “how to ensure better and better access to our collections, and
2. “how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity.”
The result was astonishing and could arguably be one of the greatest cultural achievements to date in the young world of social networking.
Here’s what happened within two days:
• All 3,100+ photos have been viewed
• 420 of the photos have comments
• 1,200 of the photos have been favorited
• 392,000 views on the photostream
• 650,000 views of photos
• About 1.1 million total views on our account
In their wildest dreams no one at either the LOC or Flickr expected this kind of public response.
“Frankly, none of us could quite fathom how fantastic the response to the pilot has been.” is how they put it at Flickr’s blog.
And Matt Raymond of the Library of Congress responded by saying “I can tell you that the reaction to this two-day-old project has already vastly exceeded our expectations.”
This is a watershed event. It is a solid web 2.0 victory and one that just might expand the boundaries of social networking, where people are interacting with places as much as with people.
For the Library of Congress, and all the libraries that are watching how this pilot turns out, it is a brave new world. Now the conversation must include the question – what are we doing to bring our collections to the public? Your collection strategy can longer be solely focused on having people come to you to see what you have or in loaning items to other institutions, museums etc.
The success of this pilot might also have an affect on the Google Book Search model that many libraries are endorsing. Maybe libraries need a more multi-dimensional Web 2.0 approach to their collections, one that encompasses more than just digitizing the contents of their books.
Image from the Bain Collection at the LOC