This is your weekly update of important events and notes about the institutions that partake in the Flickr Commons.

• Virtuous circle – from visitor to speaker: Read about how the Flickr Commons transformed the relationship of one of the Powerhouse Museum’s guests.
• The mystery of Level One: what is happening at the Powerhouse Museum?
• What in the Powerhouse’s workshop? A telescope!
• The Brooklyn Museum releases v.1.3 of their iPhone application… and lessons learned.
• Cool – the Brooklyn Museum’s iPhone application gets a mention on the O’Reilly Radar.
• And check out their awesome Twitter profile at Beyond the Fail Whale.
• How Green These Valleys Were: Some info about the Library of Congress’s recent uploads to the Commons.
• Smithsonian Web and New Media Strategy v 1.0: Hot off the press.
• Who do you trust? A post by Marvin Heiferman, Smithsonian Photography Initiative, on the veracity of photojournalism.
• Are You There? by Merry A. Foresta, Smithsonian Photography Initiative, on travel photography.
• Ten Years Later: A round-up of the Chandra X-ray Lab, from the Smithsonian.
• Matthew Lewis talks Harry Potter 7, IMAX, and weird fans, all at the National Media Museum.
• Praise for PANDORA: A post from the State Library of Queensland, Australia, on Australia’s Web Archive. They also have 3 new digital stories available.
• Fellowship Awards Preserves Films: A short report on this project by George Eastman House.
• Job Search: How to Avoid Interview Mishaps: Get armed for your next job interview, from the good folks at the New York Public Library.
• Also, The Craft of the Book: Reading List: A PSA from the NYPL
• Oh yea, and the NYPL is looking for a Senior Applications Developer. Apply now.
• The Australia War Memorial goes on the offense about the terms ‘wounded’ and ‘injured’.

Friday Fun!

Need more baby animals fix? Look no farther than Flickr and the National Zoo’s photostream.

Go Visit!

01 August – My Fair Lady at the Dryden Theatre, George Eastman House, a Lerner and Loewe classic.

Now through 18 October – In Focus: Making a Scene at the Getty Museum. Theatricality and photography: “the images in this exhibition are inspired by art history, literature, religion, and mainstream media.”

13 August – The New York Public Library partners with the NYC chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association to host screenings of HBO’s series on Alzheimer’s Disease.

One of my favorite sets in The Commons is the New York Public Library’s Japan / Kusakabe Kimbei, one hundred hand-colored albumen prints from around the 1880s. It covers a wide range of classic tourist scenes of Japan, and has provided me long hours of research entertainment since last December when the NYPL joined the Flickr Commons. On a recent trip to Tokyo I was happy to upload a few more photos of the scenes “now,” and excitedly visited an exhibition of a Kimbei album held by the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.

Travel photography spread out from Europe in the mid-1800s, reaching Japan with the arrival of Felice Beato in 1863. Beato leveraged highly skilled colorists from Japan’s domestic printing and advertising industry to add life to his black and white prints, creating works of art unique from other parts of the world. His apprentices spun off their own studios. One of these was Kusakabe Kimbei, who opened up shop in 1881. Within a few years, Kusakabe had a large array of photographs available by catalog: individually or in large, lacquer-bound volumes. The volumes offered a sampling of scenes from around Japan. These volumes remain in private and museum collections around the world, and NYPL has a fine example.

Added to Flickr Commons, NYPL’s uniquely provide a great public window on Japanese tourism history. They were taken at popular travel destinations such as Nikko or Kyoto, in remote locations along the Tokaido road, and in and around the foreign settlement at Yokohama. With a bit of web searching and cross-referencing — especially with the wonderfully annotated collection at Nagasaki University — more precise dates and locations can be provided for many of the photographs, and they can moreover be understood in context with each other.

For example, this photo of the Grand Hotel on Yokohama’s waterfront:

The clues in online archives at Nagasaki University and the University of Washington, as well as photos hosted by Mitsubishi Electric and the Kanagawa Museum of Cultural History, send the camera spinning around the hotel and up the canal over a span of years. Finally, this leads to not only the location of the hotel, which is described on many Japanese sites, but to the actual positioning of the camera in the NYPL photo.

It’s a treacherous sport that can take several hours per photograph, but is rewarding more often than not. Recently a commenter in one Yokohama photograph wondered where it might have been taken. A quick look at a David Rumsey map of Yokohama and a Nagasaki University image provided the name of the bridge in the photo. Back and forth with other folks on Flickr leads to an understanding of where to take the photo today, and what it might look like.

Creating a “now and then” coupling of photos is truly satisfying, and always educational. Hunting down a photo that someone else has taken is great fun. But the true way to honor these travel photographs is to visit the spots yourself, and perhaps take a “now” shot, as I discovered this on a recent trip to Tokyo:

(This one’s not a Kusakabe photograph.)

The discussion of the Yokohama photo happened after I got back, so it’s on the list to visit next time.

Coincidentally, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography is running a series of exhibits this summer titled Traveling Photography (Tabi suru Shashin). The first installment features, among other images, 50 Kusakabe Kimbei prints from an album in the museum’s collection. I thought it would be nice to see them in person and look for images I recognize from NYPL, Nagasaki, and other collections. What I didn’t expect, though, was how utterly stunning they look. Compared with scanned, digital copies, the beauty of museum’s physical artifacts was brilliant. They shimmered with life, and their colors had a luminosity missing from normal developed film, and certainly from reproductions made for the exhibit book and even the hard-bound biography printed in 2006.

Now I’m hungry for more, and I hope everyone else is too. I’d love to see a traveling exhibit of Japanese travel photography, akin to the one in Tokyo but paired with “Now” photos from Flickr (I volunteer to take missing photographs, if there’s grant money lying around). It would feature holdings by many institutions — among Flickr Commons participants, at least George Eastman House, the Smithsonian, and the NYPL hold Kimbei photographs, and more likely have other old photos of Japan like the NYPL’s. These works of art need to get on the road, and be gawked at as they were originally intended!

Among the joys of browsing the Commons is finding those photos whose dates are more specific that “circa 1920″ or even “1920″. Here, in celebration of the middle of summer — or winter, as the case may be — are photos from across the Commons, from Julys past …

Cyclists climb over a closed railway crossing. July 1932, the Tour de France.

Nationaal Archief

“Revolutionary uprisings in Persia and Mexico threaten civil rebellion”. July 5, 1908, the New York Tribune.

The Library of Congress

The Dudley Cantrell Band plays at Grace Bros. July 15, 1937, Sydney, Australia.

State Library of New South Wales

A young bride is prepared by her bridesmaids. July 11, 1970, Nantucket, Massachusetts.

Nantucket Historical Association

Tom Walton plays the guitar. July 4, 1982, White Springs, Florida.

State Library and Archives of Florida

The Langley Flyer superstructure is loaded onto a houseboat. July 1903, Widewater, Virginia.

DC Public Library

Berenice Abbott captures one moment in the city. July 16, 1936, Union Square, New York City.

New York Public Library

Seven testifying scientists pose for a photographer during the Scopes Trial. July 1925, Tennessee.

Smithsonian Institution

American manufacturers parade on Independence Day. July 4, 1893, Chicago.

Brooklyn Museum

And Mme Gadriol goes for a ride. July 9, 1899, Luchon, France.

Bibliothèque de Toulouse

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Parc Monceau (8e arr), 1901-02

George Eastman House: 1981:0955:0049.0001

view + comment on Flickr

NASA
Astronaut James Irwin gives salute beside U.S. flag during lunar surface extravehicular activity (EVA), August 1, 1971
George Eastman House: 1992:0007:0002.0001

• George Eastman House posts a terrific podcast on the The Lunar Orbiter Camera, manufactured by Eastman Kodak.
• Also from GEH, The Moon Imagined, about James Hall Nasmyth and the moon.
• The Getty Museum tweeted a great old moon photo in their collection to celebrate the 40th anniversary of men walking on the moon.
• Students can help archive the Internet – the Library of Congress teams up with the Internet Archive (hey! George works there, yay!) and the California Digital Library to launch the K-12 Web Archiving Program.
• The Field Museum launches a new Facebook application! Get yer pirate on, matey…
• Preserving Gallipoli aerial photographs, an article from the Australian War Memorial about one of their fascinating and unusual collections.
• Check out the Picks from the feminist bloggers on the Brooklyn Museum’s site: Feminist art, news, and events from the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art.
• Have you read the New York Public Library’s Blogging@NYPL? A great resource for book reviews and info on their services.
• Read Destination: Niagara Falls, a great article by Christin Boggs of the Smithsonian Photography Initiative.
• Iain Logie Baird, the curator of television at the National Media Museum, talks with the BBC about an old TV set.
• View podcasts of the NMeM’s film series.
• The Oregon State University Archives has a new take on preserving history (psst, it involves Flickr!)
• The Powerhouse Museum asks for your help with direct input into the Australian Government 2.0 Issues Paper.
• Do also check out some fun notes about their Odditorium exhibit.
• Learn about debris from an exploded star in the Smithsonian Institution’s Chandra X-ray Lab blog.
• View the Design in D.C. webcasts on Friday, July 24, 10 a.m.–11 a.m., from the Smithsonian’s National Design Museum.

In March, many of the Flickr Commons institutions posted photos of women, to mark Women’s History Month.  The Smithsonian took the opportunity to solicit help from the “crowd” in crowdsourcing:  they posted some images of women for whom they had little more than a name.  Who were these women? the Smithsonian asked. They were once noteworthy enough to have their portraits taken for the files of the Science Service.

Identities followed for many of the mystery women, and fairly quickly.  “K. M. Drew” turned up in a biographical dictionary as Kathleen Mary Drew-Baker, an English botanist; “Mrs. Howard S. Gaus” needed a name adjustment to be recognizable as Bird Stein Gans, a child development specialist and cousin of Gertrude Stein.   Mrs. Gans was matched to her correct name beyond a doubt when a Flickr user found her passport photo for comparison.

But then there was E.S. Goodwin.  A few suggestions came in, but nothing solid.  For months, no leads — and there were no beakers or books near her to even suggest what she did.

E.S. Goodwin, now given her full name on Flickr

In July, however, the mystery was solved in an extraordinary cascade of discoveries by Flickr users, and now E.S. Goodwin — Elizabeth Sabin Goodwin — is surely one of the best documented women in the Science Service set.  Washington DC librarian rockcreek got the real breakthrough on July 9, by finding a 1924 wedding announcement from the Washington Post about the impending union of Miss Elizabeth Sabin and Francis Le Baron Goodwin, both artists.  As if that weren’t enough, rockcreek also found Elizabeth Sabin’s high school yearbook photo — with a clear match to the original image.   Flickr user Brenda Anderson followed up the next day with some genealogical explorations, including a New York Times obituary for Elizabeth’s paternal grandfather.   Within hours, Wisconsin-based local history researcher vintagepix posted the obituary for Francis Goodwin, and rockcreek was offering to stop by the cemetery where Elizabeth Sabin Goodwin’s husband and parents were buried (with hopes of finding a tombstone for Elizabeth as well).

Sometimes, it just takes a name and a face … and a lot of volunteers with research skills and a shared love of solving mysteries.

Cyanotype is among the earliest of photographic processes, and the examples of its use found in the Commons are all also early. Sir John Herschel invented the cyanotype in 1842, and Anna Atkins was its first active practitioner — and perhaps the first female photographer as well. The New York Public Library photograph below is among many of hers held at the NYPL and available in the Commons on Flickr.

You can read a basic description of the cyanotype process on Wikipedia . Mike Ware is among modern improvers on the process. The Flickr group Cyanotypes is devoted to new examples of this very old technique.

Himanthalia lorea (1843-53)

New York Public Library

Elevated view of the flooded river and West End, Brisbane, 1893

State Library of Queensland, Australia

People indoors, Lysekil, Sweden (1880s)

Swedish National Heritage Board

Jetties Beach, c. 1890s

Nantucket Historical Association

Finding cyanotypes — or photographs of any particular type or process — in the Commons, particularly as it grows larger, depends on terminology being in the photographs descriptions or tags … in the language you look for it in. If you’re browsing the Commons or commenting on a Commons photograph, take a moment to add search terms to tags.

Your weekly update of newly uploaded images to the Flickr Commons is here, inviting you to take a trip on some legendary trains and ships of yore… but beware of hazards!

Oregon State University Archives reveals a magnificent set of Western U.S. travel lantern slides, depicting missions, universities, and scenic views found along two well-known rail routes in Arizona, California, and Oregon. Be sure to read all the links they provide as this is a really informative set.

Shasta and Sunset Routes

Delightful ships abound in the National Maritime Museum’s photostream! See London, destroyers, barques, and great figureheads.

Port Cities London

Perhaps you fancy a flight on a hot air balloon? Enjoy stereoscopic travel images, from the National Library of New Zealand.

Stereographs

Nature is a formidable opponent, though, so beware of flooding. Images from the State Library of Queensland, Australia.

Floods

Keep your hands and arms inside the boat, kids! The State Archives and Library of Florida show off their photos of when disaster struck.

Hurricanes in Florida

Escape back to civilization with the State Library of New South Wales to enjoy new uploads from Sam Hood.

Discover Collections – Theatre in Sydney

Then it’s on to Lisbon, Portugal with the Biblioteca de Arte-Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian to see photographs from the Estúdio Horácio Novais.

Lisboa: perspectivas gerais e parciais

Don’t miss their exquisite images of Portuguese tiles found in Luanda, Angola.

Angola

We’ll wrap up this week with 50 more Bain News Service images from the Library of Congress. You know there are plenty of mustaches there waiting to be tagged.

News in the 1910s