The Ebor Falls haven’t diminished much in beauty between 1900 and today.

Powerhouse Museum	neoxx
THEN	NOW

Thomas Smillie
Untitled Cyanotype, 1890
Smithsonian Institution: RU_Box76_077

Thomas Smillie was the Smithsonian’s first photographer and curator of photography. He and his studio staff documented the institution’s physical buildings and work spaces, including curators’ offices, new museum buildings, exhibition installations, and the furniture used to store objects.

view + comment on Flickr

Heard on Twitter

Heard around the Commons:

• TwitterLeague puts the Library of Congress as top-ranked Twitter library! NYPL isn’t far behind … and NLNZ is edging its way up the list!
• Don’t despair, museums, AOL Search has got your rankings! Getty’s at #3, and the Brooklyn and Field are on that list too.
• Tweets from the Getty:
  

  Feathers, guts, lipstick, mummies… American art conservators are in LA @ annual meeting discussing techniques! Follow along at #AIC20

• Apply for the Web and eComm Summer Internship at the Field Museum in Chicago!
• The Multi-Platform Museum: A talk given by Nina Simon at the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History on 18 May. Take in the rest of her blog while you’re there, too.
• “Flickrization is also another step to preservation of urban history in the virtual realm,” by Jaunted: The Pop Culture Travel Guide.
• Digital Cultural Heritage: Concepts, Projects, and Emerging Constructions of Heritage, by Marija Dalbello.
• Past meets present in Flickr’s museum project, an article in the Vancouver Sun.
• Spotlight on Click! You can use the Smithsonian’s Flickr Commons images (or your own) with your stories to add to a growing collection … and Smithsonian curators will be looking at your entries!
• Did you know the Smithsonian is on UStream? They’re working on their social skillz.
• Smithsonian Hopes To Cash In On Stiller Movie, by Elizabeth Blair, NPR’s Morning Edition.
• The Library of Congress discusses the magic of Hollywood; visitors up nearly 70%!
• And the Brooklyn Museum was in the movies before either of them: Robert Redford, The Hot Rock.
• Crowdsourcing the Clean-Up with Freeze Tag! A new tagging game from the Brooklyn Museum.
• Book discussion of The Holy Woman by Qaisra Shahraz: A podcast from the D.C. Public Library.
• Below Ground: Tales of HVAC pipes at the George Eastman House.
• Carnival of Space: a round-up of Hubble news by the Chandra blog at the Smithsonian.
• Ludwig Marx: A Unique Australian’s Story, by the Australian War Memorial.
• Chirp, chirp: new Flickr Commons set! It’s spring and time to look at the pretty birds … from the Oregon State University Archives.
• Milstein joins the Flickr Commons! And the New York Public Library tells you all about it.
• Uncle Sam 2.0: U.S. Government Goes YouTube — from the Library of Congress.

Friday Fun!

Dear beloved Library of Congress: Can haz these short videos on Flickr, plz? KTHXBAI!

Go Visit!

Now Open — Walls of Algiers: Narratives of the City, at the Getty. Can’t go? You can see the exhibition on Flickr and download the PDF file of the exhibition brochure!

22 May — Ernst & Young 3-D Theater opens at the Field Museum. Dinosaurs Alive!

23 May – RIT Student Honors Show at the George Eastman House’s Drysdale Theatre. The annual Honors Show highlights some of the year’s best student work from RIT’s School of Film & Animation.

27 May – Looted Art in Europe 1938-45 and its restitution since the Second World War, a talk by Professor Richard J. Evans, a renowned historian and one of the leading experts on the Nazi period, at the National Library of Wales.

We found some creative remixes of Commons photos from Caroline, a.k.a. The hills are alive, on Flickr.

recriminations, by The hills are alive

I was thinking of this being a representation of moods of recrimination that flare up in relationships sometimes.

She created this witty montage using two Commons photos:

Library of Congress	Brooklyn Museum
ORIGINAL	ORIGINAL

Of her remix, the letter cast a pall over the morning, Caroline says,

… he’s a major, and I think that makes him very much like a fed agent. Same upright stature and gravitas.

Library of Congress	The hills are alive
ORIGINAL	REMIX

On the young explorers, she implores the viewer,

You are all welcome to come along too on an exploring expedition on giraffe-back … There are loads of them just waiting to be saddled up for another adventure. Please put generous quantities of lemonade and crumpets in your rucksacks …

Library of Congress	The hills are alive
ORIGINAL	REMIX

Caroline’s work is renowned on Flickr. Her testimonials tell the story:

Caroline has a wonderfully artistic eye for a shot and when that eye happens to be closed, she has the creativity to really make something from almost nothing. –Stevekin

Caroline is an alchemist, who transforms everyday sights into magical, beautiful, sometimes witty and always highly expressive works of art. She is also a great friend –*halbar

Algeria: French, Arab, North Africa, Sahara, mosques, Notre Dame, Albert Camus — A photo essay using Commons images of Algeria and the words of Camus.

I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I cannot know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it.

Getty Research Institute

Knowing that certain nights whose sweetness lingers will keep returning to the earth and sea after we are gone, yes, this helps us to die.

Brooklyn Museum

Gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.

Getty Research Institute

All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly.

Nationaal Archief

Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty.

Library of Congress

The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Brooklyn Museum

King Street at George Street, Sydney, Australia, with a few years time between them. Visit the one on the right to see notes about the buildings in the photograph then and now.

State Records New South Wales	Powerhouse Museum
THEN – 1888	and … THEN! – 1900s

We welcome to the Commons the Getty Research Institute! The Getty brings to the Flickr Commons, to start, from “a Photo Study Collection comprised of approximately two million study photographs of art and architecture from antiquity through the 20th-century”, photographic postcards of Algiers in the early 20th century — postcards whose stamps tell of real journeys as well as those across time:

Casbah: Rue du Tombouctou (December 20, 1909)

Department of Commerce
Space shuttle liftoff from the Kennedy Space Center: Merritt Island, Florida,
between 1978 and 1990.
State Archives of Florida: RC24196

view + comment on Flickr

1984 stage play featuring John Hurt — rehearsal
Photograph by Jim Moran

See photos from the rehearsal of the Orwell play 1984, featuring an exclusive video performance by John Hurt in the role of Big Brother, at the National Media Museum’s Flickr stream. The play opens on June 3.

Heard around the Commons:

• Radnorshire on Flickr — Can you help? The first British library to join the Flickr Commons is The National Library of Wales!
• The Field Museum is a nominee for the best museum for kids in Chicago!
• Clouded leopards cubs at the National Zoo (Smithsonian) — They are now eating cooked chicken three times a day, in addition to their formula.
• Learn about the Smithsonian’s first staff photographer, Thomas Smillie, and vernacular photography.
• The applications developers at the New York Public Library provide batch reindexing for Drupal + Solr. Also, an update to Infomaki is released. That’s not all … DigitalNZ and Brooklyn Museum API modules for python are also released.
• The Bibliothèque de Toulouse announces …
  

  After lengthy deliberations under the watchful and amused condescension by Jane Austen, this is the name of the winner of the Jane Austen quiz …

  Learn who at their blog.

• The Brooklyn Museum films Valerie Hegarty discussing her work in 21 and Fallen Bierstadt.
• Go behind the scenes at the Brooklyn Museum’s staff show.
• And they relate museums to the NBA.
• The finalists in the Library of Congress’s River of Words competition speak out.
• Library signs are metadata: an article from Aaron at the D.C. Public Library.
• Collecting/Recording the 2009 Queensland State Election, by the State Library of Queensland, Australia.
• Oregon State University celebrates their National Historic District status!
• The George Eastman House honors Flickr re-mixer pennylrichardsca, for her incredible purses!
• Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. The Field Museum talks pirate with the Chicago Sun-Times. Aye, matey.
• Read all about the Smithsonian’s Chandra X-Ray Lab’s one time shuttle trip.
• Seeing the Invisible with Megan Watzke, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory

Friday Fun!

Go Visit!

May 18–24: The Bibliothèque de Toulouse announces Alors Chante …! de Montauban, a traditional music festival. The opening concert is free at the Park Montauriol.

May 22: Night at the Museum opens at the Smithsonian’s IMAX theatre … starring the Smithsonian!

June 1: Sun K. Kwak talks to teen artists at the Brooklyn Museum.

June 2: Are We Alone? Astrobiology and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life Lecture at the Library of Congress, with Daniel P. Glavin, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.