Why is The Commons important to institutions and archivists?
Participating institutions benefit from greater exposure of its collections through Flickr’s high profile and it’s large user base. The Commons also allows participating institutions to harness the limitless power of the crowd to mine otherwise inaccessible data. Photographs from different collections can be linked together, newly indexed, by the public, through Flickr’s folksonomic tagging, providing valuable metadata and increasing the utility of search results without committing scarce institutional human or overhead resources or reducing institutional integrity in collections data.
