As you mention, the National Library of Wales has been a part of the Flickr Commons initiative for a little over a year now. We have uploaded 500 images to date of which 370 have been chosen as favourites.

As it happens we have recently written an end of year report on how things are going with Flickr Commons, and whether we wish to proceed with it…and the answer was an unequivocal yes! How much it costs in terms of resources to select, prepare and upload content compared to the number of views we’ve had, certainly shows such a great project to be a part of Flickr Commons really is.

As you point out in your post, we haven’t had many comments identifying people or places (although we have had a few). This wasn’t our main intention in joining the Commons, but we are looking at the potential that this, and other forms of ‘crowdsourcing’ might have on metadata creation and collection.

We felt it was a place where we could share our collection with a large audience. It can be difficult to get people to come to an institution’s website or catalogue to view collections, especially if they’re not looking for something in particular, but Flickr already has an interested audience. It’s always our intention to look for new and exciting ways of sharing our collections with as many people as possible online, and Flickr Commons fitted the bill perfectly.

We have been very pleased with how the project has gone so far, and have had many very positive comments saying that people are enjoying our collections – and I guess for us, that was exactly what we wanted.