Yahoo’s Flickr is teaming up with the Library of Congress to bring a lot more public photos to light, and perhaps as importantly use community comments to help categorize the pictures.    The US Government has an almost incomprehensible amount of information in various places and formats, and we need to applaud all efforts to get that data online for all to experience or use in research.

Matt at the Library’s blog says the project hopes to:  

… ensure better and better access to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity.

Great work!     In a decade or so one can imagine that the web will be a respository for hundreds of billions of photos covering most of the earth, and tagged with data to help identify even many historical and geographic nuances that can only be understood through community input.    Will this bring world peace?  Nope, but it’ll be cool.