The library of congress has opened a flickr and posted nearly 1,700 color slides from it’s archive – including many from over 60 years ago. And they look IN-CRED-ible. Mental floss picked out their favs.

This is fantastic – more! I desire more! There are currently over 4,000 total prints uploaded, and it looks like this has been an ongoing process starting on the 3rd of this year, and they are still posting images from the 1910 decade. I bet if they dumped their entire archive onto flickr it would go down like a dirty dirty whore.

Oh yeah, the best part is that many, if not all, are public domain, no known copyright restrictions.

The detail on some of these images is so incredible it’s a shame they’re jpegged to death. I mean, just look at the clarity and vibrance in this shot, 67 years old. And then I discover that you can go to loc.gov and search their master database of these images, which includes a jpeg and ARCHIVAL TIFF!! Except, holy shit the TIFFs are 200 megs. The LOC apparently don’t fuck around (and that’s the way I like it.) Well, the lack of copyright restriction and the availability of ultra-high-resolution TIFF reproductions means that you can get a print of any of these from a few cents to a few bucks depending on what you’d like from your local independent photo store.

They do take about a half hour to download. I’m thinking I should just download as many as I can, and then when Comcast comes down on me like a ton of bricks for hogging bandwidth I’ll have a finger to give them.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 8th, 2008 at 13:20.