Elizabeth B. Thomsen

Yesterday’s Brainiac column in the Boston Globe, “Everyone’s a historian now,” is about the Library of Congress images on Flickr. Columnist Joshua Glenn admits that asking the crowd to provide identification and information about these pictures makes him nervous, but notes that “so far, so good” and he gives examples of information already provided by Flickr members. “Crowdsourced history — maybe there’s something to it, after all.”
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The Library of Congress collections on Flickr have gotten a lot of attention and activity since its launch on January 16. Flickr reported on their blog that in the first twenty-four hours after the launch, users added about 19,000 tags and just over 500 comments. The Library of Congress reported on their blog that all 3,100 + photographs had been viewed, with over 650,000 photo views in total as of the evening of January 17.
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The Library of Congress and Flickr have a new pilot project called The Commons. Photographs from two of the American Memory collections, 1930s-40s in Color and News in the 1910s, a total of over 3,000 images.

The first set consists of photographs taken for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and later the Office of War Information (OWI) between 1939 and 1944 and focus on rural areas and farm labor, and World War II mobilization, including factories, railroads, aviation training, and women working, and these records have some descriptive and subject information that’s been carried over to Flickr. The other collection, New in the 1910s, are news photographs from the Bain News Service, taken in about 1910-1912, and there’s minimal information for these.
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Nerd World: In Which I Read Some Manga — Lev Grossman posted this article on Time’s Nerd World blog about his first the manga series Death Notes. I thought it was interesting because unlike most of the articles about this topic, it’s not written from the perspective of fan, but someone who admits that he’s been avoiding manga until now:

I would see the books lying around, but they’re kind of off-putting. They’ve got all these symbols and icons on them, all that kanji, and the paper quality is so awful, and they have words like Shonen Jump on them. And they all look alike. Plus they’re, you know, backwards. (It took me a few pages to figure out that you read the panels from right to left. Oops.) And I don’t really know how to pronounce manga.

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