Heard around the Commons:

• The Luce Foundation Center, part of the Smithsonian, discusses how Flickr “citizen curators” help with their projects.
• The Powerhouse Museum reports on a talk given by Shelley Bernstein, Chief of Technology at the Brooklyn Museum, at the Transformation in Cultural and Scientific Communications Conference.
• Free photos, an audio report on the Commons from Radio New Zealand, featuring our own Brenda Anderson and Courtney Johnston of the National Library of New Zealand (audio file – 16 min.).
• The National Library of New Zealand summarizes the Designing & Sustaining Creative Communities workshop from Webstock, including good bits from Heather Champ, Director of Community at Flickr.
• Peer inside Lincoln’s watch, from the National Museum of American History (Smithsonian).
• Tweet! “Smithsonian Photos on Flickr Commons got as many visitors in the first 3 months, as last 5 years on our sites.”
• The National Museum of American History (Smithsonian) discusses the portrayal of women in science, a nice adjunct to its Flickr set for Women’s History Month.
• Oregon State University Archives and the Powerhouse Museum also blog about International Women’s Day here, here and here.
• Humour: Web Tech Guy and Angry Staff Person, from Michael Edson of Smithsonian 2.0.

Recent uploads from the Commons:

An enjoyable set of lighthouses from the Nantucket Historical Association, the newest member of the Commons. The waters around Nantucket are deceptively dangerous. Many boats have been ripped apart in the shoals and rips around the island, and few older Nantucketers don’t have stories about shipwrecks and disasters at sea.

Nantucket Lighthouses, Lightships, and Lifesavers

Photos of heroism from the Australian War Memorial. In the clear skies over the Western Front in France and in the Middle East, young men fought in flimsy machines of wood, linen, and wire.

Over the Front: aircraft and airmen from the First World War

The Biblioteca de Arte-Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian features photographic advertising for products, companies, and shops, produced by Studio Mário Novais.

Publicidade

The State Archives of Florida brings to life folk musicians, artisans, storytellers, folklife interpreters, and other Florida peoples and their traditions.

Florida Folklife Collection

Elegance and grace, from the State Library of New South Wales.

Ballet

I want to ride my bicycle … and you can, virtually, with this set from the State Library of Queensland, Australia.

Bicycles and more

And a re-cap on all the fabulous uploads for International Women’s Day in the Commons!

International Women’s Day

Go Visit!

18 Mar. – The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and the National Portrait Gallery present two films by Bonnie Kreps: Don’t Fence Me In: Celebrating Women and Girls of Wyoming and Arctic Dance: The Mardy Murie Story, a biography of a woman who played a key role in preserving the magnificent wild and scenic landscapes of Alaska.

19 Mar. – Alex Harris discusses his journey into Cuba, part of the Wish You Were Here travel lecture series at the George Eastman House.

Every Thursday – Meet our Museum at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

Please give a warm welcome to the Nantucket Historical Association, the 22nd institution to join the Flickr Commons!

The mission of the Nantucket Historical Association is to preserve and interpret the history of Nantucket Island and foster an appreciation of its historic significance. Entering the Commons with 208 delightful photos of Nantucket, you’ll find it all here, from lighthouses to puppeteers, and you’re sure to find notable images.

unknown
Postcard of the sea serpent
Nantucket Historical Association: PC-Humor-1

Charles Bertram Bell
Prince of Wales on a race horse at Ascot, Brisbane, 1920
State Library of Queensland, Australia: 2548

Edward, Prince of Wales, on a race horse at Ascot, Brisbane, during his visit in 1920, as photographed by Charles Bertram Bell.

view + comment on Flickr

One of the biggest draws of Flickr is the social aspect of groups. Any Flickr user can open a themed group with a pool of photos and discussion threads. Here, we explore some of the groups that Commons’ institutions are running on Flickr.

Australian War Memorial:

• Love and War: For people to share their photos and stories of Australians in love and war: how do people meet, do they marry, how do they keep a relationship going in spite of separation?

Brooklyn Museum

• Brooklyn Bridge (Brooklyn Museum Website): Images of the Brooklyn Bridge from the Brooklyn Museum archives, library, and art collections, as well as the text of our 1983 exhibition catalogue The Great East River Bridge, 1883–1983 on our website.
• Brooklyn Museum: For photos of the Brooklyn Museum, Steinberg Family Sculpture Garden, Target First Saturday events and, of course, the Museum’s fountain. Photos of friends and family visiting the museum are welcome too!
• Wikipedia Loves Art: A scavenger hunt and free-content photography contest by the Brooklyn Museum in coordination with a host of other institutions.

George Eastman House

• George Eastman House: Photos taken at The George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y.

National Maritime Museum

• Beside the Seaside: UK seaside photos — beaches, proms, piers, beach huts, fish and chips, fairground rides, & seagulls.
• Sailor Chic: The Sailor Chic exhibition at the National Maritime Museum has closed but you can still view some of the collections online — and this photo pool keeps growing.

Oregon State University Archives

• What did you see, Where did you go: History in the Making: History is made everyday at OSU and they want to capture it. For photos of some major OSU event or just a beautiful sunset over Milam Hall, it’s something that someone may want to see in another fifty years.

Powerhouse Museum

• Australia in the 1980s: Shots that represent Australia in the 1980s. They might be photos of yourselves, your friends, your haircuts, places, possessions and events, but we want to see how you interpret this decade.
• Modern Times: For contemporary shots that represent ‘Modernism’. This may be architectural, city spaces, furniture, interiors, fashion and design but really we want to see how you interpret this era today.
• Sign design in Australia: To see images of signs, taken in Australia, that have captured your attention in some way.
• Tyrrell Today: Images from their Tyrrell photographic collection taken around the late 1800s to the early 1900s. Post your contemporary images taken from approximately the same location.

Smithsonian Institution

• SIConnections/Lincoln in Your Hometown: For Lincoln images in Washington, D.C., across the country, and around the world (if you can find it!). Connections between history, art, and culture, as well as connections across the centuries, from the time of Lincoln to the inauguration of our new president.
• Twitter picture share: A space for @Smithsonian Twitter Followers to share their images of the Smithsonian, its projects, museums and exhibitions.
• Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) and the Renwick Gallery: Photos of the museum and gallery, featuring the courtyard and the cupcake installation.
• National Museum of Natural History: Photos of the exhibitions and of your family and friends enjoying the museum are all welcome.
• Smithsonian: National Air and Space Museums: For pictures from the museum on the National Mall in Washington, DC and the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center next to Dulles International airport.
• National Museum of American History: Images of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.
• National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution: Photos taken at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.
• Star-Spangled Banner Share Your Story Project : Share your thoughts about what the American flag means to you and your submission may become a part of the mosaic on the online exhibition: “The Star-Spangled Banner: The Flag That Inspired the National Anthem.”
• @1934: An American Art group inspired by the exhibition, 1934: A New Deal for Artists, February 27, 2009 through January 3, 2010 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
• Smithsonian 2.0 Conference: Smithsonian 2.0 was a two-day interactive gathering exploring how the Smithsonian can better and more effectively reach the younger generation with its collections, materials, and expertise through the web and web/new media-based interactive strategies.

Flickr Groups We’ve Noticed Around the Commons

While many of us on Flickr are inclined to view photographs as an art form — to analyze for composition and artistic intent, and to prefer those photographs that “feel” to us to be artistic, and to aim to produce photographs as art ourselves — for the vast number of people on the site and in general, throughout the history of photography, the primary function of the photograph is to document. On Flickr, that documentation tends to be of special family moments, of our travels, or of public events, and we still hope that they are “good” photographs.

In archival collections, the photograph as document is more likely to be a “purer” documentary: to provide a record of what is. The Nationaal Archief’s collection in the Commons called Arbeids inspectie is an example of such documentary, not only in the seeming lack of effort to create artistic documentary photographs but also in the sheer number and repetition of subjects.

The Netherlands’ Labour Inspectorate shot at least 5,000 photographs in the first half of the 20th century documenting working conditions in companies. These documents served a purpose beyond the act of documenting: they provided visual evidence of infractions, and they “added weight to [the inspectors'] reports, making them more convincing and therefore more effective tools for achieving their goal of improving working conditions.”

To be sure, some are beautiful photographs. This image of a girl preparing fabric for sewing is enchanting: her smile, the light vignetting, the elegant, self-contained composition. It’s almost easy to forget that she’s a young girl doing hard factory labour, so that someone can buy new underwear.

Nationaal Archief

Others are nearly the opposite. They are purely functional, and without context, engage the viewer very little. The Nationaal Archief has, though, given us context as well. These two dull (in many ways) photographs of have been digitized together with their original description: Mechanische beschadiging aan een staaldraadkabel, waardoor een dodelijk ongeval plaatsvond in de Machinefabriek Reineveld te Delft — “Mechanical damage to a steel cable, making a fatal accident occurred in the Machinefabriek Reinhart Field in Delft”

Nationaal Archief

Still others are haunting. Even without context, these photographs tell us of human suffering. At the time, these photographs may have changed someone’s lives: improved their working conditions where they were, or sent them looking for another job when the workplace that causes this suffering was shut down. Today they retain a power that goes beyond their context, insisting that we look: that we see the truth that is written in the body.

Nationaal Archief

There is a lesson in this archival collection, as there is in many such archival collections around the world, and one that can also be read in many non-Commons collections on Flickr: Photography, like the word, can speak both from and to power … and it can alter the world it documents.

Last week, the Brooklyn Museum released a public API allowing outside programmers access to their extensive Collections database. While the Flickr API allows developers access to the Brooklyn Museum’s images on Flickr, uploads are made over time so that people can more easily follow and add metadata to the collection as it accumulates. Consequently, the vast majority of the Brooklyn Museum’s Collection is not yet available via Flickr, and is inaccessible via the Flickr API.

The Brooklyn Museum’s API is inspired by Flickr’s, and structured very similarly to it as well. This has allowed Indicommons chief of development David Wilkinson to build Brooklyn Browser, a simple but effective tool for searching and browsing the museum’s collection inside an Adobe Flash–based interface. The advantage here is simplicity and speed. After running a basic keyword or name search, the results can be clicked on and expanded without having to load up additional pages, making it much easier and faster to browse through images in the collection.

This tool may be a work in progress, and is limited to 20 results per search, but it demonstrates how adopting elements of the Commons can benefit internal collections. Open APIs allow services and collections to become interconnected, the experience of outside developers to be engaged, and new tools and spaces to be fashioned to benefit the community at large.

Happy International Women’s Day!

The Commons celebrates this day by paying tribute to the women of the world with an extravaganza of new uploads. See new sets from the George Eastman House, the Nationaal Archief, Oregon State University Archives and the Powerhouse Museum devoted to International Women’s Day!

The Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution are jointly honoring Women’s History Month by holding special exhibitions and events:

See all the wonderful women of history in The Commons by searching on the tag “womensday”:

Women across the Commons

Give flowers to a woman in your life today!

International Women’s Day is celebrated across the globe annually on March 8. We honor this day with a pair of photos demonstrating the power that women have achieved in the past 100 years.

Library of Congress	James Gordon
THEN	NOW

Taken circa 1910, this portrait of Elisabeth Freeman at a suffragette rally shows the tenacity of women struggling to attain voting rights. Freeman braved arrest and a brutal wintertime march, the Suffrage Hike, from New York City to President Wilson’s White House, in protest of the inability of women to vote.

Fast forward to 2005, where we witness an Iraqi woman having her finger inked after casting a vote at a polling station in Mosul, Iraq. The photographer, James Gordon (jamesdale10 on Flickr), was deployed to Iraq in 2005 as the Army Corps of Engineers Gulf Region Division (Baghdad) public affairs photographer, where he documented Corps reconstruction and new construction activities in Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan, including this historic vote.

Hind Fadhil, a young woman, called an American-run talk show, ”Your Voice,” from the Arab neighborhood of Islah Zirai, which residents of Mosul refer to as an insurgent stronghold, to explain why some on the west bank went to the polls despite the danger.

”We didn’t care,” she said. ”We just wanted to vote.” —New York Times, Feb. 3, 2005

See more photos from various Commons’ institutions that celebrate this great day of women.

Palmer, Alfred T.
This girl in a glass house is putting finishing touches on the bombardier nose section of a B-17F navy bomber, Long Beach, Calif., October 1942
Library of Congress: LC-USW36-212

view + comment on Flickr

Heard around the Commons:

• What does it take to join the Commons? ArchivesNext asked Tiah Edmunson-Morton of the Oregon State University Archives exactly that!
• The Brooklyn Museum has its own API for its web collection! Read the museum’s announcement and visit the API site for more details. The National Library of New Zealand also has its own API.
• Elliot Young, at the National Library of New Zealand’s blog, explains Subversive Git, a good summary of version control systems.
• The Powerhouse Museum tells a great tale about a remixed photograph from its Flickr collection.
• Try a book review of Yesterday’s Tomorrows: The Powerhouse Museum and Its Precursors, 1880-2005, by Graeme Davison and Kimberley Webber.
• Seb Chan discusses a number of tools at the Powerhouse Museum’s Fresh and New(er) blog: Readability – reducing clutter with a bookmarklet, QR Code and a Google Analytics Report Enhancer.
• Did you know the George Eastman House held an Academy Awards 2009 party?
• The wrap-up post for the Brooklyn Museum’s Egyptian dig. We’ll be interviewing someone on their team about the dig later this month.
• In the news: the Library of Congress tells CBS all about data rot.
• Panda Time! Learn about the Smithsonian Photography Initiative and Pandas (video).
• Also, the Smithsonian Institution launches a new blog on photography. As new photos are uploaded to the Commons, the Smithsonian asks archivists, researchers, and curators to talk about some of the fun stories in the pictures or behind the scenes.

Recent uploads from the Commons:

Oregon State University Archives posts a magnificent series of photos depicting Celilo Falls on the Columbia River prior to the construction of the Dalles Dam in 1957. The falls were once Native American fishing grounds. OSU provides a wealth of links and resources to discover more about this buried treasure.

Gerald W. Williams Collection: Celilo Falls

Get your locomotive on with Paths of Iron, train photography from the Estúdio Mário Novais, archived by the Biblioteca de Arte-Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian.

Companhia dos Caminhos de Ferro Portugueses

Discover the architecture of Gourdon, a small town in southwestern France with a rich prehistoric past, from the Bibliothèque de Toulouse,.

Gourdon

Fascinating group and crowd scenes by William Hall Raine, a Wellington, New Zealand, photographer. This is first in a number of Raine sets from the National Library of New Zealand.

William Hall Raine

The Powerhouse Museum adds to its Phillips Collection. Read the write-up at the museum’s blog.

Phillips Glass Plate Negatives Collection

The Smithsonian Institution adds to the corpus of Lincoln photographs. See these treasures in person at the One Life: The Mask of Lincoln exhibit.

Abraham Lincoln

More new uploads from the State Archives of Florida … put on a happy face!

Florida Commerce

It’s almost International Women’s Day! Suffragettes galore from the Library of Congress.

News in the 1910s

Go Visit!

Now Hiring: Media Assistant for the National Museum of American History, part of the Smithsonian Institution. Help the SI use social media!

13-28 Mar.: The Bradford International Film Festival at the National Media Museum. Experience film from Mexico, Latvia, Japan, France, Australia, Great Britain, Canada, the Netherlands and the United States.