Here’s a great story for Lincoln’s birthday. An essay by Kitty Eisele on National Public Radio this morning described photographs of Abraham Lincoln that were recently found in the Library of Congress. They had been misclassified in the past, but a researcher using the Library’s digital image collection noticed the error. The NPR essay, Uncovered Photos Offer View of Lincoln Ceremony, states that the library had received a large collection of Civil War photographs in the 1940s, with handwritten logs. Some of the writing was hard to read, and over time, the caption for these photos were misplaced. But recently, a researcher in Colorado spotted the mislabeled Lincoln photographs in the Library’s online collection.
The Library of Congress is also experimenting with putting some of its image collections on Flickr and asking the public to add descriptions to them. Try tagging some of the photographs yourself – who knows what you’ll find!