New York Public Library’s Flickr Photostream
I’ve really enjoyed browsing through a bunch of old photos posted to Flickr by the New York Public Library (thanks to BoingBoing for posting).
This seems to be part of a recent trend. Not too long ago, The Library of Congress released a bunch of photos to Flickr, as have The Smithsonian Institute, and many other organizations.
This is super exciting, for many reasons. For one, I love looking at old photos; even if they depict the most mundane of subjects, they have some kind of magical quality. And now they’re more accessible than ever, in a forum that many of us have come to love (well, at least tolerate 
But whenever I see batches of archival images being uploaded to the Flickrverse, the think that what excites me the most is the ability to see how the places that I’m intimately familiar with — the places I walk by every day — have changed over time.
To this end, it doesn’t seem as if many of the archival photos have been geotagged! I understand that they couldn’t have been tagged at the time of capture (though I am entertaining thoughts of some steampunk Victorian-era global positioning device consisting of a trembling, smoking tangle of metal tubes, gears and magnifying glasses), but is there any concerted crowdsource effort to attach locations to these photos, if only at the city or state level?
In addition to the ‘quick win’ of making the geo information available to the world of web services and web 2.0 applications (imagine the possibilities!), I think it could add an additional depth of preservation to these photographs, moving them out of the hazy ether of ‘the past’ and anchoring them to a specific location in our modern world that may look very different than it did all those years ago.
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