If I haven’t mentioned it before, I am just in awe of the Library of Congress‘s (LoC) efforts to embrace the Internet and Web 2.0.  The LoC has placed a huge number of historical images, videos, and sound recordings online in its American Memory project.  The LoC also has posted many podcasts and even professional development courses for new teachers.

Another way that the LoC has embraced new technology is by launching pilot projects on services like Flickr.  Currently, the LoC has two collections on its Flickr photostream, one for historic newspapers and the other for historic photographs.  The newspaper collection contains over 450 images, while the historic photograph one contains 13 sets with thousands of images.  Sets cover topics such as “News in the 1910s”, “Baseball Americana”, “1930s-1940s in Color”, and “Gottlieb Jazz Photos”.

Most, if not all, of the images have no known publication or usage restrictions, which means that you should be free to use these images for any purpose in your classes.  Here are some sample images from the collections (note: these images are not the original sizes).

The LoC is actively developing this pilot project by adding new images.

What’s really exciting about the LoC’s use of Flickr is that, now, visitors to the collection can link comments to specific portions of an image (useful for helping the LoC itself to identify “mystery” images in their extensive offline collections) in addition to leaving comments just like you can on this blog.

History, English, and Art teachers should be especially excited about these images, because they provide an outstanding way to put visual primary sources into your students’ hands.

The LoC’s Flickr collection is free to use and access, with no account required.  You will need an internet-connected computer with a modern web browser.