Robb Montgomery

[Germany Schaefer, Washington AL (baseball)] (LOC)

This digital image represents the millionth item scanned for the Prints & Photographs Division at the Library of Congress.

This photo shows Herman A. “Germany” Schaefer (1877-1919), one of the most entertaining characters in baseball history, trying out the other side of the camera during the Washington Senators visit to play the New York Highlanders in April, 1911.

It is part of two collections the LOC has uploaded to Flickr where the public is invited to comment, share, download and discover thousands of news photos from the 1910s and 1920s as well as earily beautiful color photos from the 1930s and 1940s.

Let the slideshow play - there’s 1,610 photo here taken by photographers for the United States Farm Security Administration (FSA) and later the Office of War Information (OWI). They created the images between 1939 and 1944. Note, Ektachrome and Kodachrome were just invented and the kodachrome emulsion is has always been a particular favorite of photogs because it is a grainless emulsion that offers deeply saturated colors and stellar flesh tones. Here you can see clearly why a love affair with Kodachrome is lifelong. I think i still have some rolls in the fridge somewhere - waiting to go into my F3.

This slide show of 1,500 photos from the daily news scene of almost a hundred years ago, was photographed by the Bain News Service in about 1910-1912.

This is but a slice of the 40,000 glass negatives that the collection preserves.
For more information and to see the rest of the collection

The wisdom of the crowd
The Library of Congress wants to get richer data attached to the photos and that is where opening the collection up on Flickr comes in. Like most photo archives - librarians rely primarily on the identifying information that came with the original photos. .
According to the LOC, “that text can be incomplete and is even inaccurate at times. We welcome your contribution of names, descriptions, locations, tags, and also your general reactions.”

Oh there are so many lesson here for news executives . . . I’ll put them in bullet form (The language of CEOs)

1. Post content that can be embedded.
2. Openly engage and empower your audience.
3. Focus on your local expertise.
4. Create a viral marketing buzz.
5. Simply do something remarkable and profound with free, open social media sharing tools like Flickr.