To every new browser tab opened, is a window to the past, thanks to the Free to Use Browser Extension from the Library of Congress.
What it means is that every new tab opened in Chrome comes a public domain photo from the Library of Congress. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the same one twice. In the last year or so the image collection seems broader. Sometimes it’s heavy on the old sports figures, other times it’s castles in Europe, often it’s political figures from a time period when they seemed to stare at you and say, “I stand for something.”
And some just make me stop and wonder what was going on in the scene. These I often leave open, thinking maybe I will come back and click the link for more. Usually I forget, and the tab, the moment, the wonder, just vanishes in a rush to look for something else.
This one stayed open. Amongst many other tabs.
Who is Gil Anderson? What is he so confident about in 1910, poised with his cigar? Why is the guy on the left leering; the on the right smiling? Why are they all wearing bowler hats?
A click on the bottom bar leads to the LOC entry page for this image.
Photograph shows racecar driver Gil Andersen standing next to his Stutz White Squadron racer. Andersen was the winner of the first Astor Cup Race at Sheepshead Bay Speedway on October 9, 1915. (Source: Flickr Commons project, 2013)
https://www.loc.gov/resource/ggbain.20070
Now it cites Flickr Commons, but unlike many entries where the image appears there, it does not provide a link. The beauty of images in this collection, beyond their own historic, curiosity value, is the clarity of a license that says “No Known Copyright restrictions”. It means that the placing of images here is done so by an understanding of the institution that posts an image that it confirms there are no copyrights.
Gil Anderson’s photo is easy to find; from the Flickr Commons search I just pop his name in. Voila!
I wonder a bit if there is a more direct route to the flickr link from the URL in the LOC collection https://www.loc.gov/resource/ggbain.20070
Among the descriptive tags on the photo entry in flickr are two “machine tags”
Machine tags are tags that use a special syntax to define extra information about a tag.
Machine tags have a namespace, a predicate and a value. The namespace defines a class or a facet that a tag belongs to (‘geo’, ‘flickr’, etc.) The predicate is name of the property for a namespace (‘latitude’, ‘user’, etc.) The value is, well, the value.
https://www.flickr.com/groups/51035612836@N01/discuss/72157594497877875/
Clicking the tag for dc:identifier=httphdllocgovlocpnpggbain20070 produces no results, so it does not act like typical tags. I can see is some form of the LOC URL https://www.loc.gov/resource/ggbain.20070 with periods and slashes removed.
The link above suggests that these are used via the flickr API.
I’m game. I use the flickr app garden interface for flickr.photos.search to search photos with this machine tag. But the results do not include the photo. I’m about to give up. but almost on a whim, try a plain flickr search on value portion of that machine tag, or httphdllocgovlocpnpggbain20070.
Bingo. This works https://www.flickr.com/search/?text=httphdllocgovlocpnpggbain20070
That should mean I can find similarly photos in flickr from Bain Collection just by using the numerical part of the URL, the identifier. So this photo of GG Bain himself has a LOC digital identifier of ggbain 15074 //hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ggbain.15074. So if there was no direct link to flickr commons, this search should find it https://www.flickr.com/search/?text=httphdllocgovlocpnpggbain15074
And so it does.
I am not quite sure if this has any use, it’s much easier to search in flickr by the photo title. But knowing a URL trick just makes it that much more fun.
But back to that photo of Gil Anderson and cigar. The flickr entry as typical provides little nuggets to explore, especially in the comments. See? there are places where comments are not cess pools. A flickr note on his jersey says “Stutz” which we read is the name of a car company. One that prided itself on being in the big race of the city where it was based.
Ideal Motor Car Company, organised in June 1911 by Harry C. Stutz with his friend Henry F Campbell, began building Stutz cars in Indianapolis in 1911.[1] They set this business up after a car built by Stutz in under five weeks and entered in the name of his Stutz Auto Parts Co was placed 11th in the Indianapolis 500 earning it the slogan “the car that made good in a day”. Ideal built what amounted to copies of the racecar with added fenders and lights and sold them with the model name Stutz Bearcat. Bear Cat being the name of the actual racecar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stutz_Motor_Company
That sounds like the cigar holding bravado seen in that photo of Norwegian born car engineer/race Gil Anderson.
One more play to be made with this image. Let’s see how a colorizing algorithm does to bring it to life. Via Algorithmia’s tools, is “a computer vision algorithm trained on a million images from the Imagenet dataset” and can be called via an API. Check out Mr Stutz in color
I never know where a browser tab opening, a random photo with no copyright restrictions will take me. Be more Stutz?
Image Credits: Screenshot comparison of Algorithmia Colorize Photos tool applied to Gil. Anderson (LOC) flickr photo by The Library of Congress shared with no copyright restriction (Flickr Commons)
