The Commons on Flickr
Posted by Brian Kelly on June 2nd, 2010
Many collections have photographs of unidentified places and people and have thought that they had little chance of ever getting the information needed about specific images. Now the Flickr Commons initiative offers a place to show these images from public photograph archives; people can then comment on the photographs, perhaps identifying locations and people, as well as adding their own photographs. So that seems a good idea, but how is it going?
http://www.flickr.com/commons/institutions/
Several UK institutions – the National Library of Wales, the National Galleries of Scotland, the National Archives UK, the Imperial War Museum and the National Maritime Museum – have uploaded images to the Commons.
So how are they doing? They are getting comments – but it seems not the useful ones they had hoped for. One of the NMM images is titled ‘Cat on Steam Yacht ‘Morning‘ – although it’s had three responses, no-one has provided any further information. And that seems to be the case with the other images I looked at.
Are we expecting too much from these initiatives? Is it that the people who did have the knowledge are now dead? Recently I’ve been working my way through some unlabelled family photographs dating back to 1890 to 1930 and all the people in my family who would have known the details are no longer around. Would uploading these to Flickr achieve anything?
If your institution has uploaded images to Flickr Commons, please add a comment to let us know what you put up and what response you’ve had.
June 10th, 2010 at 3:32 pm
Thanks for the post, it’s interesting to here other people’s viewpoint of Flickr Commons.
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.