On October 21, 2008, the Nationaal Archief and Spaarnestad Photo became the first Dutch heritage institutions to place a small selection of their photos on Flickr in The Commons. Within two weeks, the photostream of the Nationaal Archief had over 400,000 page views and 400 comments. These large numbers were caused by the extensive amount of attention the media dedicated to the initiative — resulting in, among other things, articles in national newspapers De Volkskrant and Het Parool, radio reporting by the Wereldomroep, and, most spectacular of all, a prime-time news item in NOS Journaal (causing page views to rise up to 100,000 in one night). This initiative was started as a pilot project to involve the broad audience in photographic collections and metadata generation. The pilot proved successful: with almost 2,000 comments and over 6,800 tags added, Nationaal Archief has incorporated the use of Flickr as a standard feature for public presentation and metadata generation.

Recently, Nationaal Archief has launched another Flickr pilot: Mapit1418.nl, an online tool aimed at collecting geographical metadata on a selection of photos from World War I. Partly thanks to The Commons, Nationaal Archief has gathered quite a lot of data on this collection, but for most of these photos the locations are unknown. With Mapit1418.nl, the archive seeks to research what significant role a geotagging game can play in adding specific knowledge to its collections.

Mapit1418.nl is a mashup of two data streams: a subset of Nationaal Archief’s Flickr photos and Open Street Map data. A new and simple website was developed as a game “shell” for the mashup. The game is simple: select a photo, study it, and add it to the (suspected) right location on the map, adding an “argument” for that location (”I recognize that bell tower in the background”) or even a photo of that same location today. Earlier locations can be overruled by every new player, but selection of the “right” location (some degree of uncertainty will always remain) is in hands of the jury: every month, from a pool of the most frequent players a jury selects a winner. He or she (we see an almost even distribution of men and women on the website) wins large reproduction of a WWI photo.

Up till now, some 50 locations have been added to the photos. Since we aim at WWI “knowledgeables”, discussion tends to develop around specific themes. Some users disagree about the origins of a certain war vessel — a phenomenon we love to observe and stongly encourage. Hopefully it will lead to a just location in the end …

www.mapit1418.nl (sorry, only in Dutch)
Open now until April 24, 2010

Paul Hagon is the mashup developer whose amazing mashups of Google Maps and images from the Commons were featured on Indicommons recently.

Could you tell me more about yourself?

My first coding experiences were back in high school when I learned the basics of programming on a VIC-20 and a TRS-80. This sparked an interest in computers, but my real passion is in design. I studied Industrial Design at university.  I was still involved with computers then, but mostly doing a lot of CAD drawings, renderings, Illustrator and Photoshop work (this was back in the days of Photoshop 1.0). After graduating I worked in the furniture industry for 7 years before moving into the web world.

I always had a fascination about how people interact with things. Industrial design was perfect for feeding that fascination — it has an extremely personal scale of interacting with an object.  Designing for the web is so similar, it’s interaction at a personal level.

When the internet came on the scene in the mid ’90s, I read lots of websites and read lots of books, taught myself HTML and never looked back.  I moved out of the furniture world and into the world of cultural institutions when I got a job as a web developer with the Australian War Memorial (who recently joined Flickr Commons). Since 2006 I’ve been a web developer at the National Library of Australia.

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Flickr member Paul Hagon creates a fabulous mash-up, illustrating the power of the Commons. Here, Flickr meets Streetview, using the Flickr Commons’ images of New York in the 1930s from the New York Public Library. Paul also mapped images from the Powerhouse Museum, the State Library of New South Wales and the National Library of New Zealand.

Paul Hagon’s Street View Mashups:

• New York street view mashup
• Powerhouse Museum street view mashup
• State Library of New South Wales street view mashup
• New Zealand street view mashup