Confessions of a technophile

The Library of Congress has released a report on the impact of its participation on Flickr Commons. Lots of interesting nuggets of information about LOC's experience that will be useful to libraries interested in putting up stuff on Flickr even if they're not on Flickr Commons. Some of the points in the report that jumped out at me:

• The high level of public interest in the LOC's collection on Flickr Commons was unexpected.
• Of the 59,193 tags added through May 13, 2008, 40% of these tags were added by a small group of 10 “power taggers” (defined as taggers who provided over 3,000 tags each)
• By August 2008, more than 500 Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC) records had been enhanced with new information and cited the Flickr Commons project as the source of the information that was changed or added.
• Average monthly visits to all PPOC Web pages rose 20% over the five month period of January-May 2008, compared to the same period in 2007
• Given the emphasis of “place” in user-supplied tags, “geotagging” (specifying the location at which the image was taken using special tags called geotags) should be a popular activity, but the number of geotags remains significantly lower than 1%.
• Do the community-supplied tags work to drive searchers/browsers to LC’s photos? The lack of a mechanism to easily correlate searches to community-supplied tags remains a problem when trying to answer this question. We know from blog posts and emails that some users access the photos directly from the photostream—in fact, they anxiously await the weekly load of new photos. What is not as clear, however, is the degree to which discovery is based on searches of the tags, descriptions, or groups other than for searchers who begin their searches outside of Flickr.