Library of Congress vs. Flickr - A Bitter Battle

I always love the opportunity to pore through historical photographs. My hometown is very rich in history (Chillicothe, Ohio) and so I was excited to browse through the LoC's photos and see what they had.

Here are the search terms I used:

• Chillicothe
• Chillicothe Ohio
• Adena Mansion
• Camp Sherman
  
• Majestic Theater
• Ross County
• First Capital Ohio

I expected that since this is a library and items would be cataloged in a standardized way, not in the way of user tags or groups, that the searching and search results would be more rigid. That was certainly true. Although the results returned to me certainly were more direct matches than Flickr, there were far less of them.

Because of the way the LoC catalogs, I was certain I would have to use more specific language to get the results I wanted, and that was true. In short, I felt as if I had to think like a cataloger, instead of using terms that popped into my head normally. Which is fine, if you know how to think like a cataloger.

To be honest, though, the biggest issue with the LoC in comparison to Flickr was the lack of variation in the results, and a lack of actual sources. All the photographs returned to me appeared to be mostly by the same photographer and mostly on the same subject (a snowstorm in the 40's). The results seemed shallow. Even photos that were not of the 40's snowstorm were the easy to find photos that every historical place or restaurant in town has up on their wall. I had hoped to find something new and fascinating. (Confession: I'd hoped to find one on Camp Sherman that is the back side view to the panorama shot I tagged in Delicious. I've been searching for that forever because I truly believe one has to exist. If that photographer had turned around, he would have snapped a shot of my mother-in-law's house because there's no doubt about it, that panorama had to have been taken from her front porch.)

Lastly, I found LoC to be frustrating because it appears as if they have more on file than is available on their searches. Quite a few results came back as "not digitized" or as "group records" and it would be fascinating to see the photographs they have records for.

All in all, not a bad collection of photos I ended up with, though. I definitely would rather use Flickr, simply because the features like Sets and Galleries are so easy to use, and it allows for a certain amount of networking as well, like groups that focus on historical photos of the area. The ease of the tags is also hard to deny, as is the scope of their collection.
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That said, Flickr doesn't allow for much record keeping, and it was great to see the details behind the photos of LoC