Yahoo-owned photo sharing website and web services suite Flickr has been tapped by the U.S. Library of the Congress to tag, through its community, some 3,000 vintage photos. Many of the photos are missing key caption information, like where the photo was taken and who is pictured, which will hopefully be filled in by Flickr's users.

"From the Library’s perspective, this pilot project is a statement about the power of the Web and user communities to help people better acquire information, knowledge and—most importantly—wisdom. One of our goals, frankly, is to learn as much as we can about that power simply through the process of making constructive use of it," said Matt Raymond, the Library's director of communications.

As part of the agreement, Flickr has created a new space on its site, The Commons, for publicly held photograph collections. The Library is also open to suggestions for which future collections to post, and one suggestion which reportedly comes up frequently is the release of American Civil War photos.

"There are two main aims to The Commons project, starting with the pilot: firstly, to increase exposure to the amazing content currently held in the public collections of civic institutions around the world, and secondly, to facilitate the collection of general knowledge about these collections, with the hope that this information can feed back into the catalogues, making them richer and easier to search," wrote George Oates, designer at Flickr.

Ludicorp, a Canadian company, launched Flickr in February 2004. In May last year, Yahoo decided to close its photo-sharing service Yahoo Photos and help users move pictures to Flickr or elsewhere on the Internet. Flickr, which was bought by Yahoo in 2005, is the home of two billion photos.

Also, in 2007, Flickr added seven languages in order to facilitate the users' interaction. Flickr is thus available, besides English, in French, German, Korean, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and traditional Chinese.