The afternoon at Survive or Thrive starts with a presentation from Jo Pugh from the National Archives talking about their experience of using Flickr.
National Archives – archive of the British Government – contains everything from 11th, 12th century manuscripts, to the web archive of the last UK government.
Jo made 8 arguments for putting pictures on flickr:
- Be a ‘shop window’ bringing content to new audience
- User tagging will creat folksonomies – which will make things easier to find
- Content will proliferate acrsoss the site
- It supports annotation – tool for teaching/learning
- Users will tell us more about our collectionat than we know
- Users will embed content on their own sites and so can the National Archives
- Users will repurpose large bodies of our content in interesting ways in mashups
- Users can post their own content
Perhaps also some arguments over speed (faster to upload to flickr than locally?), and familiarity (people already using Flickr)
Cost – $25 per anum is a pretty good deal for putting pictures online. Low resource means low risk.
Working at webscale doesn’t mean people are going to start using your content automatically. It’s Flickr that is working at webscale – not your content. Flickr ‘Commons’ helps – exclusive membership and more likely to get interested audience. The National Archive collection is almost exclusively ‘Crown Copyright’ – whereas Flickr Commons default is ‘no known copyright restrictions’ – although as National Archive have power of Crown Copyright they can allow reuse – which also fits Flickr definition of ‘no known copyright restrictions’
Jo wants to be the Library of Congress (i.e. emulate their success on Flickr) – currently only achieving a 10th of the views that LoC has achieved.
Jo saying the user community on Flickr (specifically Commons) to be ‘good’ – tend to attribute when they use etc. Compared to wikicommons for example. However you still have to expect the unexpected – e.g. this re-editing of a photo http://www.flickr.com/photos/big_lion_head/4463202111/
However, need to be careful to judge use and reuse – it is all engagement with content and difficult to judge value of this.
There is a developer community working around Flickr – need to think about engaging them – they may build stuff you’d like to have done:
Some things don’t work so well on Flickr – navigating multipage or multipart documents for example. Need to recognise these limitations. [quite suprised there isn’t a ‘book reading’ app already for flickr to allow you to flick through pictures in this way?]
The NA haven’t been as successful in getting user contributed pictures as they’d like. Some work happening here but not going to happen on Flickr, but rather a local system.
National Archive doing lots of interesting things – experimenting. Jo mentioned a new site for experimentation – TNA Labs – going to be launched v soon – probably next week.
Don’t know how long Flickr will last – or how long the audience on Flickr will last. Can get content out though.
Q & A
Q: (from Wikimedia) What were the problems with doing wikicommons?
A: Some issues with attitude – just scraped pictures and did nothing interesting with them. (Wikimedia saying, would be talk)
Q: (William Kilbride) (oops, got distracted and missed the thrust of this question) – something about using volunteers to build community on the site maybe?
A: We aren’t good at Digital Engagment. Need to improve – haven’t been as imaginatives as we could have been in the use of volunteers