By Ginny A. Roth
National Library of Medicine #C04102
The National Library of Medicine is pleased to announce its partnership with Flickr as a new member of The Commons. Public domain images from the History of Medicine Division’s historical collections are now accessible through The Commons on Flickr via a photostream, where visitors are encouraged to contribute information about images by adding comments and tags. Among the hundreds of images available are book illustrations, photographs, fine art work, ephemera, and posters, including the 1918 World War I Red Cross nurse recruitment poster featured above. Visitors will also find albums (collections of images) including selections from the book Hidden Treasure, patent medicine trade cards, and AIDS posters.
The Commons on Flickr began as a pilot project in 2008 as a partnership with the Library of Congress with the dual purpose of increasing exposure to publicly-held collections at institutions around the world, and encouraging the general public to contribute information about these collections. Now the National Library of Medicine joins nearly 100 institutions internationally in an effort to share knowledge and build a detailed catalog of images that will educate and fascinate visitors.
By making our collections accessible through Flickr we hope to learn more details about our collections, create dialog about our holdings, and engage with the public. Our collection of images on Flickr will continue to grow so we hope visitors will check back frequently for new content. The images being released to The Commons are a selection of public domain images from the National Library of Medicine’s larger database of digitized images, Images from the History of Medicine (IHM), which includes over 70,000 images illustrating the social and historical aspects of medicine dated from the 15th to the 21st century.
Here you can view a selection of images from the photostream:
Ginny A. Roth is the Curator of Prints & Photographs in the History of Medicine Division at the National Library of Medicine.
A wonderful resource!
Fantastic. Now I have to join Flickr!
Thanks for your comment. We wanted to let you know that you don’t need to be a member of Flickr to view photos. You can go directly to our photostream, https://www.flickr.com/photos/nlmhmd/, without having an account. You do need to create a Flickr account to leave comments and tags and to add photos to your favorites. If you already have a Yahoo! user name and password, you can use these to access our photostream as well. We hope you’ll check back often for more content!