Two more Australian institutions join Flickr: The Commons
Published by elliott bledsoe on Friday, 12 December 2008 at 10:23 AMThis blog is of course about Creative Commons but occasionally I am prone to wander. At least talking about the public domain, like I am going to do right now, is related. In particular, I want to talk again about the Flickr: The Commons project.
In the last few months the Australian War Memorial and the State Library of New South Wales joined Powerhouse Museum, Sydney on The Commons, bring the tally of Australian institutions contributing public domain images to the the repository to three. Imagine if every library, museum, archive and institution here in Australia were.
I guess it is easy to say 'Who cares' to an initiative like this. Lots of old photos have been available for viewing in a number of libraries for years, doesn't mean anyone really looks at them. As I have argued many times with people in governments and institutions, just making content available, even available online from government websites, does not mean that people are going to:
- know it is there;
- look for it; and
- find it.
Government information is more useful when it is placed where people already go rather than expecting people to come and get it from the government. Flickr: The Commons is a brilliant example of a number of government run institutions recognising this and acting on it. Many of the institutions involved with Flickr: The Commons have their own extensive photo libraries accessible online, but arguably by placing them on Flickr they have been accesses far more than via the institutions' own online interfaces.
On the blog of the Library of Congress, the inaugural institution on The Commons, they say:
If all goes according to plan, the [Flickr: The Commons] project will help address at least two major challenges: how to ensure better and better access to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity.And how? The entry goes on to say The real magic comes when the power of the Flickr community takes over. On the same idea, here's what George Oates from Flickr had to say on the Flickr blog:
There are about 20 million unique tags on Flickr today. 20 million! They are the bread and butter of what makes our search work so beautifully. Simply by association, tags create emergent collections of words that reinforce meaning. You can see this in our clusters around words like tiger, sea, jump, or even turkey.
What if we could lend this wonderful power to some of the huge reference collections around the world? What if you could contribute your own description of a certain photo in, say, the Library of Congress’ vast photographic archive, knowing that it might make the photo you’ve touched a little easier to find for the next person?
We want people to tag, comment and make notes on the images, just like any other Flickr photo, which will benefit not only the community but also the collections themselves. For instance, many photos are missing key caption information such as where the photo was taken and who is pictured. If such information is collected via Flickr members, it can potentially enhance the quality of the bibliographic records for the images.
Like I said on the ccAustralia website, you could just read the War Memorial's copyright statement on their website for insight into their decision to release out of copyright images on Flickr, but Melbourne teacher librarian and blogger, Rhondda Powling does a superb job of outlining the War Memorial's sentiments on Rhondda's Reflections.
Talking about the photo above, of a group of an unidentified members of the Australian Headquarter’s staff taken by Captain James Francis Hurley, she says:
Wouldn’t it be great if these men could be identified and their story told. What about the young people sharing this with older members of their families. Who knows where it could lead? Doesn’t it make for some interesting ideas for research assignments for students, or creative writing, telling a story that might have been. It could combine historical research and creative writing for English. The books of Anthony Hills or Ken Catran, or the My story series could be used as examples.This is exactly what Flickr: The Commons exists to do.
I want more
So you want more on the Flickr: The Commons project. Here's some stuff worth looking at:
- Australian War Memorial photostream on Flickr: LINK
- State Library of New South Wales photostream on Flickr: LINK
- Seb Chan from Powerhouse Museum, Sydney has an excellent entry on the potential of the project on the image services blog, Fresh + New(er): LINK
- Paul Hagon's succinct explanation of why Flickr: The Commons is different to The National Library's Picture Australia Flickr groups: LINK
- Entries tagged 'flickrcommons' on the Brooklyn Museum's blogs: LINK
- Entries tagged 'the commons' on the National Library of New Zealand's LibraryTeachNZ blog: LINK
You'll pass this on, won't you:
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