Very interesting posting from the venerable Library of Congress on its blog (which by itself is pretty cool). Here’s a snippet:

Out of some 14 million prints, photographs and other visual materials at the Library of Congress, more than 3,000 photos from two of our most popular collections are being made available on our new Flickr page, to include only images for which no copyright restrictions are known to exist.

The real magic comes when the power of the Flickr community takes over. We want people to tag, comment and make notes on the images, just like any other Flickr photo, which will benefit not only the community but also the collections themselves. For instance, many photos are missing key caption information such as where the photo was taken and who is pictured. If such information is collected via Flickr members, it can potentially enhance the quality of the bibliographic records for the images.

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.

Except for my general nervousness about putting this stuff into a privately held, for-profit organization, I think this is quite cool. It has the advantage of putting the data where the people already are. As a footnote to the posting says, it takes a photo of a grain elevator as an example “because it helps illustrate that there are active Flickr user groups for even such diverse subjects as grain elevators.” As the Commons page says,

The key goals of this pilot project are to firstly give you a taste of the hidden treasures in the huge Library of Congress collection, and secondly to how your input of a tag or two can make the collection even richer.

You’re invited to help describe photographs in the Library of Congress’ collection on Flickr, by adding tags or leaving comments.

Gives me little goosebumps.

And, by the way, the photos are fantastic. [Tags:library_of_congress tags flickr folksonomy taxonomy photographs metadata ]

Kathy Gould at The Palos Verdes Library District blog has a very interesting post (which I’m proud to say was kicked off by something in my book) on the role of librarians as catalogs are enabled to sort themselves based on why someone is searching for something. The post grew out of a conversation with Betth Jefferson at Bibliocommons.

“So what happens when this role of helping people find the information that meets their particular needs is transferred from the librarian to the user community at large?” Kathy asks. The answer she gives presents librarians as creators and maintainers of the systems (an information architecture role, as I’d call it), as guides to and through the system, as voices in the system, and as facilitators of the library’s role in the community. But she puts it better than I just did.

Sounds right to me. [Tags: ]

I just published a new issue of my free newsletter. The main article is, entirely by coincidence, about ebooks and libraries — a coincidence because Amazon just announced Kindle, its ebook hardware.

The main article is a response to Anthony Grafton’s recent article in the New Yorker that tries to de-hype claims about the future of libraries.

By the way, Everything Is Miscellaneous is available for Kindle.

Also by the way, I just got a link from Urs Gasser to a recent conference on the future of books. [Tags: books ebooks kindle amazon libraries everything_is_miscellaneous ]

The estimable Lorcan Dempsey of the OCLC points to a presentation by Michael Panzer (also of the OCLC) about how to “webbify” the Dewey Decimal System.

The question Michael addresses is how to take the Dewey Decimal Classification system to the “networked level,” defined as “Infrastructural improvements to make a KOS [Knowledge Organization System] web-scale accessible, to make sharing, syndicating, leveraging of its data feasible.” He begins by scoping the problem. He then talks about the issues in webbifying the DDC, which he boils down to three: URI design, caption design, and format considerations.

He proposes a scheme for URI’s (which, especially in the condensed form of a PowerPoint presentation I don’t fully understand, but are probably beyond me even if spelled out), with examples such as http://dewey.info/concept/338.4/en/edn/22/. Notice the DDC number after the “concept” designation.

Captions he acknowledges depend on context, and with Web services (Michael points out), one cannot always know the context in which one’s captions are going to be used. He also discusses the importance of maintaining the hierarchy, but the bullet points are too compressed. (Not a criticism. The PowerPoint deck wasn’t intended to be self-standing, and I don’t know enough to be able to fill in all the missing context.)

To the third point, he looks at adopting either the MARC 21 or (and?) SKOS formats.

As Duncan says, “This is part of an ongoing investigation of what it means to release more of the value of ‘classic large-scale vocabularies’ in a web environment.” There’s lots of info packed into Dewey’s system. How can we best liberate that info?

[Tags: dewey_decimal_system libraries kos michael_panzer]

There’s a transcript of a long chat about my book among librarians in a book club, led by Stolvano Barbosa. They give it a good going over, including frequent drubbings. Fascinating, at least to me; I kept wanted to jump in, but that’s sort of hard to do with a transcript :)

If you’re interested in the future of books and libraries, and if you’re in Cambridge MA on Tuesday, you should come to the Berkman Center at 12:30 to hear Aaron Swartz talk about the Open Library project, which is gathering a global, open and free list of every book it can find out about. It’s also attempting to help with the problem that books exist at multiple levels of abstraction: There’s Hamlet, editions of Hamlet, Hamlet in anthologies, Hamlet in translation, books based on Hamlet, etc. This is an important and fascinating project.

We serve lunch. Please RSVP. See you there…or on the webcast. (Details) [Tags: open_library aaron_swartz libraries ]

Peter Van Dijck has set up a consulting company to help organizations organize their Web-based information in ways accessible to a world-wide community. Peter’s named his company 290s because that’s the “Other religions” category in the Dewey Decimal system.

Chris Locke has posted the cover of every book he’s read while researching his Mystic Bourgeoisie blog. It’s oddly compelling.

If he’d sized them by how important they were (and by how much of each he’d actually read), we’d have a Book Cover Cloud.

Karen Schneider (the Free Range Librarian) is one of those strong-voiced writers who really make a difference in her domain. Now she is leaving the American Library Association’s TechSource blog — which she was instrumental in beginning — in order to follow her writerly instincts. Her last post is a message to librarians that usefully points them toward their fears. [Tags: karen_schneider libraries ala ]

Martin Weller has an excellent article on the future of content, presenting an economic and a quality argument for why it’s bound to be (in my terms) miscellanized.

This is the first in a “distributed blogging” experiment that will have three other bloggers responding. [Tags: content publishing books clay_shirky martin_weller long_tail chris_anderson]