Flickr commons for libraries and museums

Flickr commons develop in 2007 – LoC approached Flickr about sharing photos, encouraging users tagging jan 16th 2008 launched Many nations now participating Can now only search the commons

http://www.flickr.com/commons/

Brooklyn Museum – contributing to the commons caused flickr account to get flooded with comments, also posting photos that they “think” are something posting to flickr confirms or discredit it

Can no longer respond to all comments, just completely got overwhelmed, it was no longer the small user community they knew and loved, were very close to leaving

Goes beyond community working with their stuff, they are also helping with our workload What is the best way to add images to existing sets?

Ask the question of the commons community, and you’ll get an answer

Library of Congress Power commoners –

do historical research and get really involved History detectives provide support to their statements by linking to sources online

People provide personal memories of photos Historical context discussions Then and now photos

New York Public Library – Flickr puts photos in space more accessible than they currently are, Failed in the creation of community – they framed it as a technology project,

No know copyright restrictions, other rights like privacy

If someone posted a question who was going to answers? The subject specialist, got some irate responses from curators saying how could they do this with their stuff? They are now trying to engage where they can, rather than thinking about it as a distribution channel for photos or technology look at it as community engagement

Smithsonian – considered it more of a social experiment, than a technology issues

Wide range of subject matter means communicating with widely different community of users

What you need is a small group of like minded people at your institution to get it started, once it takes off (quick victory project) and the positive feedback starts other will be lining up to participate

Questions

One of the problems is that flickr is created for individual users, when you use it for a institution you have one password that everyone has, that might not be the greatest thing Flickr allow strikeouts so handy for corrections Copyright isn’t the only issue – if there is a picture of a person, that person or descendants might have some rights to the photo