Das Bundesarchiv and Wikimedia Commons

An announcement from Das Bundesarchiv (German National Archive) and Wikimedia Commons:

Starting on Thursday Dec 4, 2008, Wikimedia Commons will witness a massive upload of new images. We are anticipating about 100,000 files from a donation from the German Federal Archive. These images are mostly related to the history of Germany (including the German Democratic Republic) and are part of a cooperation between Wikimedia Germany and the Federal Archive. [Commons:Bundesarchiv – Wikimedia Commons]

This is another interesting example of a major cultural organization putting materials in an important web destination. Presumably there is some background context which explains why they are going here rather than in the Flickr Commons which has been providing a venue for image collections from several cultural institutions (most recently The National Library of New Zealand and the Imperial War Museum).
A notable part of the arrangement is the use of German National Library authority files.

The other part of the cooperation is a tool for linking people from a list compiled by the Federal Archive to the German Wikipedia Persondata and to the person authority file of the German National Library (something German Wikipedia has already been doing since 2005). [Commons:Bundesarchiv – Wikimedia Commons]

Via my colleague Art Smith.