The photograph above was taken in 1942 by David Bransby. It shows a worker at the Vega Aircraft Corporation in Burbank, California. It has been made available on Flickr by the US Library of Congress as a pilot project where users can add tags to and comment the pictures. And it’s definitively a hit. The photos have just been online for a few days, but already many of them have been viewed thousands of times, and the flickerati are busy tagging and commenting (UPDATE: details on the Flickr blog). Popularity among users is important in itself. Many cultural institutions — museums, archives, libraries, broadcasters — have been working for years digitising their collections, but are they reaching the audiences? Cooperating with a big, user-enthusiast-driven site like Flickr is obviously a brilliant way of making a cultural treasure known. But the project tackles another important issue as well. Librarians are currently discussing (link to story in Norwegian) whether to allow users/readers to add tags to the otherwise strictly controlled catalogue system. Library of Congress has decided to give it a try, and it’ll be exciting to see where the experiment goes.

Meanwhile, the photos published on Flickr are without known copyright restrictions, so there is no reason not to display such gems as the one below — photographed in 1942 in Colorado by Andreas Feininger — on your own blog.