Flickr Commons, a collaboration between the photo-sharing site and the Library of Congress that began in 2008, has released 17 of its most-popular photos to celebrate its fourth anniversary.
The project began as an effort to increase exposure to some of the world's historic photographic treasures and to crowdsource public knowledge about the archives. The Commons has a "no known copyright restriction" policy, which means the Internet community's use of the Commons' images is not limited. Typically, items uploaded to Flickr are the property of their owners.
"The Commons have really showed institutions the benefits of sharing their photos archives," Fiona Miller, product marketing manager at Flickr told Mashable. "This has really played a big part for institutions, who typically have had a closed approach to their content, because they want to keep their content within the boundaries of their four walls. The wealth of knowledge they get back from sharing that content is really incredible."
Initially, the Commons included 1,500 images from the Library of Congress. Today, the Commons now includes more than 56 institutions in 12 countries and features more than 200,000 photos.
The Flickr community has deeply engaged with the Commons since its launch: 127 million views, 7 million favorited images and 130 million member comments.
Probably the most interesting of those stats are the comments, which have often lent historical context not previously known by their home institutions' records. The Library of Congress, as well as other institutions, have used the Flickr community to learn about mystery photos, such as identifying orphans who survived the Titanic and modern-day locations of buildings.
One of the photos in the gallery above, NASA's "Blue Marble" image of the Earth, became one of Flickr's most popular images in less than two weeks, receiving more than 3.5 million views in less than two weeks.
Where do you see the future of digital archiving going with projects like the Flickr Commons? Let us know what you think in the comments.