Library of Congress Photo Collections on flickr.com

This is an important project from several perspectives. Sites like flickr have several advantages over library websites, at least for public domain content:

- the content is accessible and highly visible to millions of people

- users are already familiar with the interface from posting their own content and looking at items from their friends, so there is little need to develop tutorials or schedule numerous instruction sessions to get people started

- tagging and comments. Over time, more libraries will have next-generation catalogs and digital library systems that incorporate these features, but they still won't have the huge user populations of services like flickr (or youtube, or facebook, wikimedia commons, etc.)

FWIW, though, I don't think this will save our libraries any money. If anything, the increased exposure may increase public demand for more retrospective digitization. If so, perhaps the good folks at yahoo.com would be willing lend a hand, especially for smaller libraries and museums.