The Library of Congress has teamed up with Flickr to share some of its massive photo collection.
The LOC has about, ahem, 14 million prints, photographs and other visual materials. So far, they've uploaded 3,115 of their photos (with no known copyright) to Flickr and created two albums: 1930s-40s in Color and News in the 1910s.
Painting the American insignia on airplane wings is a job that Mrs. Irma Lee McElroy, a former office worker, does with precision and patriotic zeal. Mrs. McElroy is a civil service employee at the Naval Air Base, Corpus Christi, Texas. Her husband is a flight instructor. 1942 August.
Jim Norris, homesteader, Pie Town, New Mexico. 1940 Oct.
(Hee! Pie Town!)
LOC's photos are part of Flickr's project called The Commons.
Here's how Flickr explains the project on their blog:
There are two main aims to The Commons project, starting with the pilot: firstly, to increase exposure to the amazing content currently held in the public collections of civic institutions around the world, and secondly, to facilitate the collection of general knowledge about these collections, with the hope that this information can feed back into the catalogues, making them richer and easier to search.
And here's the Library of Congress' take on it:
From the Library’s perspective, this pilot project is a statement about the power of the Web and user communities to help people better acquire information, knowledge and—most importantly—wisdom. One of our goals, frankly, is to learn as much as we can about that power simply through the process of making constructive use of it.
The crazy thing is, the LOC has had over a million photos online for about 10 years, right here. But I think being a part of the Flickr community is definitely helping spread the word about the LOC's wealth of treasures - as well as spreading the love.