Gary Price of ResourceShelf dropped me a line last week with some links to very cool content repositories on the web that have recently opened up or expanded. Browsing through a few of these got me thinking that the sheer amount of information available from non-profits, organizations and government entities could make for some very powerful viral material if packaged properly.

Examples might include:

• Library of Congress' Prints and Photographs Collection (Virtually any product or service could make some cool historical linkbait with this material)
• 9000 NASA Press Release Photos (the Digg & Reddit crowds go wild for photos of space)
• The Access 2 Archives Project in the UK looks like it was designed in 1994, but I'm guessing you could probably mashup Oliver Cromwell and William Wallace in an AJAX timeline with this goldmine.
• How about Footnote.com, who's partnered with the Archive.gov and offers 17 million+ documents (and they're adding 2 million more every month). The coolest part? They've got a community of historian buffs digging through and publishing their own comments and stories on the material - social media marketing for Abe Lincoln fetishists and UFO conspiracists, right?
• Want some linkbait for the SEO world? Try an analysis of this publication from Yahoo! that Gary recently linked to.
• Some cool financial linkbait would be easy to craft with the data from this book industry salary guide (maybe toss in some data from Payscale and Salary.com to help round it out).
• There's even a chart that shows how Americans spend their time from the US Department of Labor.
• Last, there's links to great viral content like Inc.'s 5,000 fastest growing private companies - definitely some opportunity for research, segmentation and a few nifty charts based on that data.

With endless possibilities like these, there's little excuse for lacking the creativity to craft something specifically relevant to your industry and viral-worthy enough to spread far and wide on the web.

More inspiration? Just visit Resourceshelf or Gary's other site - Docuticker. Every piece I linked to was provided by Gary in the last few days - the man's a literal encyclopedia of sources and thanks to his blogs, that information does bubble to the surface.