If it’s Friday, it must be Carnival of the Commons day! Take a gander at recent uploads:

Astronomy! Talk about a convergence of Flickr phenomena. The Powerhouse Musuem participates in the astrometry.net Flickr project. Astrometry will provide astrometric calibration meta-data, plus lists of known objects falling inside the field of view, for any astral photos uploaded to their Flickr group. The Powerhouse is a contributor (check out the photos in this set to see what the project tells us about them! Read what those Flickr code monkeys have to say, too. And, yea, the Royal Observatory Greenwich (part of the National Maritime Museum) is in that Flickr group, too.

Powerhouse Museum

Matt Held Studio This set of photos from the Brooklyn Museum showcases artist Matt Held, of I’ll have my Facebook portrait painted by Matt Held fame. In fact, I have a request in to Held to have my portrait done. Matt is coming to speak to 1stfans at the March meetup.

Brooklyn Museum

Pop Quiz! Can you spot a fake? Check out the Brooklyn Museum’s exhibit, Unearthing the Truth: Egypt’s Pagan and Coptic Sculpture, running February 13–May 10, 2009. But first, take a pop quiz: Can you spot the fake?

Brooklyn Museum

Phillips Glass Plate Negatives Collection The Powerhouse Museum added 10 photos to its glass plate collection. Read more about one of them, Three Men Playing Cards in an Alcove, at the museum’s blog.

Powerhouse Museum

Oude beroepen / Old fashioned professions A fantastic series of images that portray historic professions in Europe, including lamplighters, town criers, men delivering ice, and the, errrr, faeces-collector. Oh my. Courtesy of the Nationaal Archief.

Nationaal Archief

From many lands — multicultural Queensland Afghan camel drivers, Chinese fruit sellers, Japanese pearl divers, and children dressed in Greek traditional costumes  — the State Library of Queensland, Australia covers the world.

State Library of Queensland, Australia

Cup Cake Art — A New Birth of Freedom The Smithsonian Institution had a clever installation earlier this week: Presidential Cup Cakes, by Zilly Rosen. We covered that here, but check out the SI’s blog post on it as well.

Smithsonian Institution

Edifícios industriais The Biblioteca de Arte–Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian added a few photos of the Abel Pereira da Fonseca, Ldª, in Lisboa, Portugal, to its Edifícios industriais set — wine! A virtual historic winery tour, if you will. BYOB.

Biblioteca de Arte-Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian

News in the 1910s Every month, the Library of Congress uploads 50 photos to Flickr from the George Grantham Bain Collection of 1910s photographs. The latest upload features some fascinating characters, such as Dr. Lyman Abbott. Abbott was a social reform advocate. He was also a Christian Evolutionist. [ed note - corrected to say that 50 new photos each week, not month, are added to this collection]

Library of Congress

And don’t forget our newest institutions to the Commons, with photos recently uploaded and waiting for your perusal.

Gerald W. Williams Collection: Civilian Conservation Corps From the Oregon State University Archives, a set of photographs from the New Deal era’s Civilian Conservation Corps in the Pacific Northwest. Throughout its nine-year existence, the program put millions to work on federal and state land for the ‘prevention of forest fires, floods, and soil erosion, plant, pest, and disease control.’ Nationwide, enrollees planted three billion trees and came to be known as the Tree Army.

Oregon State University Archives

Seminole Missionary Harriet Bedell These images reflect the lives of Florida’s Seminole Indians and the missionary activities of Deaconess Harriet Bedell among them. From the State Archives of Florida.

State Archives of Florida

Patrick Peccatte of the incredible PhotosNormandie has followed up on his metadata statistics for all Commons institutions by providing statistics on photos in The Commons which have received little attention. If you’re interested in helping to add tags or comments to any of these “forgotten” photos, his new post contains a comprehensive list of links to photos of this kind.

Patrick searched 18,290 photos across all 19 Commons institutions, finding that 5,123 had not received any comments, notes, or tags from Flickr members. That’s fully 28% of the total collection. While that seems like a large percentage, the underlying numbers are more informative. The Commons collection is very large in many respects, but it is still small enough that certain outliers skew the average significantly, as we will soon discover.

Let’s take a look numbers institution by institution, examining how many photos out each collection have not received any tags, comments, or notes. [Data collected on February 11, 2008]

Large Collections

Library of Congress – 44 out of 5,421 (0.8%)
Brooklyn Museum – 167 out of 2,554 (7%)
Smithsonian Institution – 327 out of 1,414 (23%)
Powerhouse Museum Collection– 336 out of 1,101 (30%)
New York Public Library – 561 out of 1,300 (43%)

The Common’s largest and oldest contributor, The Library of Congress, has had tremendous success in attracting attention and metadata from Flickr members. Less than 1% of their collection on Flickr goes without comments or tags from Flickr members. The Brooklyn Museum has had comparable success.  These institutions demonstrate that it is possible to maintain large collections while virtually no photos fall through the cracks. The Smithsonian Institution is also above average, although less obviously so.

The Powerhouse Museum has a primarily regional focus (Australia), which sets it apart from the other large collections, and falls slightly below the average rate of Flickr member contributions. The NYPL is relatively new to The Commons and has uploaded many photos in a short period. It may require time before the Flickr community discovers and interacts with these photos.

Mid-Sized Collections

State Library of New South Wales – 1 out of 250 (0.4%)
George Eastman House – 60 out of 592 (10%)
Nationaal Archief – 141 out of 590 (24%)
Library of Virginia – 93 out of 314 (30%)
Musée McCord Museum – 86 out of 236 (36%)

These collections, between 200 and 1,000 photos in size, show a wide range of activity. The State Library of New South Wales behaves like some of the smaller, more concentrated collections in The Commons. George Eastman House has a broad focus, more like the Library of Congress and Brooklyn Museum, with comment/tag rates to match. The Nationaal Archief is about average, but had Flickr member tagging disabled until very recently.

Like the Powerhouse Museum, two regionally focused collections fall below the average. Musée McCord Museum focuses on Canadian history, and The Library of Virginia focuses on the state of Virginia.

Small Collections

Imperial War Museum – 0 out of 10 (0%)
Australian War Memorial – 1 out of 42 (2.4%)
National Galleries of Scotland – 8 out of 107 (7.4%)
National Media Museum – 16 out of 130 (12 %)
National Library of New Zealand – 36 out of 161 (22%)
National Maritime Museum – 48 out of 191 (25%)
State Library of Queensland – 83 out of 152 (55%)

These institutions are pretty much all above average. The State Library of Queensland provides an exception but is so new to Flickr that it almost shouldn’t be in this list.

Smaller collections concentrate activity, and fewer of their photos are missed by Flickr members.

Non-English Collections

Bibliothèque de Toulouse – 378 out of 652 (58%)
Biblioteca de Arte–Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian – 2,745 out of 3,073 (89%)

60% of all untagged and uncommented Commons photos are from these two institutions, which are both from non-English-speaking countries. The outlier statistics from Biblioteca de Arte–Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian require a bit of context, however. Unlike most Commons institutions, The Biblioteca uploads photos with a thorough set of tags, applied by library staff. It may be that these photos don’t need as much metadata from Flickr members, and thus receive less.

Conclusions

The analysis presented here is very simplistic, and reaches for only the most simplistic conclusions.

Smaller collections become easily saturated with tags and comments, but very large collections are also capable of similar saturation. Regionally focused institutions have challenges drawing activity through the entirety of their collections if they grow beyond a certain size, and institutions from non-English-speaking nations seem to have even greater challenges in this regard.

Patrick Peccatte of the incredible PhotosNormandie has just published an article that provides metadata statistics for all Commons institutions. The article also includes detailed information regarding how each institution uses machine tags and photo descriptions, so if you want all the details, be sure to check out the Google translation of the original article.

Here are the statistics relating to comments, tags, and notes. The institutions are displayed in the order in which they joined The Commons. Links are also provided to the photo at the top of each category within an institution. These are useful for discovering photos that have received a lot of attention. [data collected between February 7 and 8, 2009]

Library of Congress, Washington, DC, United States

Launched on 16 January 2008, currently has 5,421 photos in 5 sets.
11,675 comments, for an average of 2.15 per photo. Max = 133
75,143 tags, for an average of 13.86 per photo. Max = 72
2712 notes, for an average of 0.50 per photo. max = 33

Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, Australia

Launched on 7 April 2008, currently has 1,101 photos in 27 sets.
1,464 comments,for an average of 1.33 per photo. Max = 97
4,619 tags, for an average of 4.20 per photo. Max = 34
305 notes, for an average of 0.28 per photo. Max = 19

Brooklyn Museum, New York, United States

Launched on 28 May 2008, currently has 677 Commons images in 6 sets.
[Following are statistics re-collected today Feb, 21]
1,508 comments, for an average of 2.23 per photo. Max = 107
4,875 tags for an average of 7.2 per photo. Max = 65
373 notes or an average 0.55 per photo. Max = 20

Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, United States

Launched on 16 June 2008, currently has 1,403 photos in 12 sets.
1,468 comments, for an average of 1.05 per photo. Max = 68
5,687 tags, for an average of 4.05 per photo. Max = 43
238 notes, for an average of 0.17 per photo. Max = 19
(more…)

US/Canada Black History Month

February is Black History Month in the United States and Canada, and various institutions are featuring events and exhibitions:

Go Visit!

11 Feb.: It’s a Flickr meetup at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England! Join people from Flickr and the NMM for a meet and greet. Meet this Wednesday at 15:30 at the ROG cafe — that’s downstairs from the Astronomy Galleries, in the ROG’s south building. Here’s more info on how to get there if you haven’t been before. See this discussion for more details.

11 Feb.: The National Media Museum, UK, In collaboration with University of Bradford, presents From the Vault, a very special selection of “forgotten” films, carefully chosen from their store of limited prints. First up this Wednesday is My Name Is Nobody at 18:00.

11 Feb.: Noon–1 PM at the Library of Virginia, Law Touched Our Hearts: A Generation Remembers Brown v. Board of Education. Editors Mildred W. Robinson and Richard J. Bonnie will offer an overview of the moving stories of those who attended public school soon after the Brown v. The Board of Education decision and saw the course of their lives and their society change.

Ending 11 Feb is the Advancing to victory, 1918 exhibition at the Australian War Memorial, featuring maps, photographs, art, medals plus an 18-pounder field gun and an exposed portion of a British Mark IV tank from the final days of the Great War.

Through 14 Mar. at the National Library of New Zealand, Welcome Sweet Peace, which brings together an array of material from the collections of the Alexander Turnbull Library that commemorate and celebrate the end of hostilities, and chart the dramatic transformation of the New Zealand home front during and after the Great World War.

New Flickr sets from The Commons

Artis – Nationaal Archief Kittens Kittens Kittens!

Artis

Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) – Library of Congress Curator of photography Carol Johnson has selected images that let you see how Lincoln looked over 20 years—from the earliest known photographic likeness in 1846, through the U.S. presidential campaign of 1860, and the pressures of the Civil War years. Views from Lincoln’s funeral in 1865 and portraits of his immediate family are also included.

Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

This week, we present new sets of images from the institution’s collections. Just uploaded this past week, these photographs are waiting to be explored, savored and commented upon.

Phillips Glass Plate Negatives Collection – Powerhouse Museum These negatives are from a collection of glass plate negatives which was acquired by the museum in the 1980s and appears to have been made by a Sydney-based photographic studio from around 1890 through to 1920.

Phillips Glass Plate Negatives

On the high seas – National Maritime Museum George Oates curated this collection of images, which includes images from Villiers’ voyages on the Herzogin Cecilie, the Grace Harwar and the Parma, as well as on Arab dhows.

On the high seas

Retouche en fotomontages – Nationaal Archief Retouched images and photo montages. Featuring actress Dorothy Jordan, a human-powered airplane, and a double-deckered bus race.

Retouche en fotomontages

Cars & bikes – National Library of New Zealand A collection of car and motorcycle images from Samuel Heath Head, of whom little is known. Please contribute your knowledge to this set.

Cars & bikes

Pets and other animals – State Library of New South Wales Pets, working animals, stock and zoo animals, and kittens kittens kittens galore!

Pets and other animals

Publicidade – Biblioteca de Arte-Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian Features photographic-type advertising for products, businesses, shops, produced by Studio Mário Novais.

Publicidade

Ponts et aqueducs – Bibliothèque de Toulouse Bridges and aqueducts in photographs taken in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Ponts et aqueducs

Inauguration – Smithsonian Institution Presidential inaugurals have a cherished history at the Smithsonian. Features inaugural ball gowns, top hats and tails, and swearing-in ceremonies.

Inauguration

National Galleries of Scotland All sets are new, as they just joined the Commons last week. Everything from Balmoral to the Great Pyramids of Egypt.

National Galleries of Scotland

News in the 1910s – Library of Congress The LOC continually adds to this set, now updated with portraits of kings, kaisers and a lady pitching out the first baseball at the opening of Ebbets Field.

News in the 1910s