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Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
The following is a guest post by Gay Colyer, Digital Library Specialist, Prints & Photographs Division. We need your help to identify 68 photos of historic structures. They’re posted in a Flickr album called “Mystery Houses,” so that it’s easy to add your notes.* The photographer, Frances Benjamin Johnston, did leave a basic clue for …
Posted in: Architecture, Flickr, Photographs
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
Reference staff member Jon Eaker spotted this photograph several months ago in the Bain News Service photographs. Jon, who has looked at many a World War I photograph in our holdings, remarked: It may be my favorite of our WWI pictures. This beast symbolizes how the introduction of widespread mechanization changed warfare. It looks like …
Posted in: Flickr, Photographs, Series: Caught Our Eyes
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
The following is a guest post by Helena Zinkham, Chief, Prints & Photographs Division. More than 75 libraries, archives, and museums now participate in the Flickr Commons to make it easy for you to discover and help identify photographs with no known copyright restrictions. The pool of pictures has grown to more than 1.25 million …
Posted in: Flickr, News & Events, Photographs
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
You may recall that last President’s Day, members of the public enjoyed a rare treat—and recorded it with their cameras. Twice each year, the Library of Congress offers a public open house in the Main Reading Room of the Thomas Jefferson Building in Washington, D.C. The space is not normally open to photographers, but cameras …
Posted in: Architecture, Flickr, News & Events, Photographs
Posted by: Jeff Bridgers
The following is a guest post by Helena Zinkham, Chief, Prints & Photographs Division. The Battle of Gettysburg was fought on July 1-3, 1863, at a small town in Pennsylvania. The fierce fighting was a major turning point in the American Civil War, with an estimated 50,000 casualties—dead, wounded, and missing Union and Confederate soldiers. …
Posted in: Drawings, Flickr, Photographs, Prints
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
While the groundhog has offered us hope of an early spring, we’re pausing to reflect back on the pleasures of last autumn, when we shared photographs and ideas about possible titles for them with readers of the blog and visitors to the National Book Festival. We’re still savoring the creativity the pictures inspired. All five of …
Posted in: Flickr, News & Events, Photographs
Posted by: Jeff Bridgers
The following is a guest post by Helena Zinkham, Chief, Prints & Photographs Division. Since readers of this blog are fans of pictures, I’d like to introduce you today to the Flickr Commons, where you can enjoy intriguing images gathered together from many places. Since the Flickr Commons launched on January 16, 2008, more than 250,000 photographs …
Posted in: Flickr, News & Events, Photographs
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
We mentioned a couple of weeks ago that we’d be playing a game called “What’s My Title?” at the National Book Festival (Sept. 22-23). I can testify that it was wildly successful–and great fun. Hundreds of people stopped by to look at the five popular photographs we mounted on a wall, and many accepted the …
Posted in: Flickr, News & Events, Photographs, Visual literacy
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
Okay. I admit it. I put my children to work this summer. Recently, when doldrums threatened, I asked them to take a look at the Library’s National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) photographs online, choose some they found of interest, and tell me why. Working as an “investigative photographer” for the NCLC between 1908 and 1924, …
Posted in: Flickr, Photographs, Visual literacy