Heard around the Commons:

• The Glenview Public Library suggests using the Commons for genealogy.
• Help the Medical Museion at the University of Copenhagen decide to join the Commons.
• Derivative Images, of the University of Colorado (Yay! Buffaloes!), discusses the Commons.
• Some brief summaries of the Flickr Commons session at the Computers in Libraries conference in Arlington, Virginia: Digitization 101 (Jill Hurst-Wahl and David Lee King), Librarian by Day (Bobbi L. Newman), and Library Geek Woes.
• Lots of logging information from the Oregon State University Archives’ April Fools set! Timber!
• The Powerhouse Museum’s Photo of the Day blog celebrates its 500th post … and you can win a print!
• Meet curator Erika Dicker at the Powerhouse Museum’s new blog, Object of the Week.
• Elizabeth Thomsen explores Commenting the Commons.
• Profiling Social Networks: A Social Tagging Perspective. Hat tip to the National Library of New Zealand for this find.
• The Brooklyn Museum posts a series of articles, “Wikipedia Loves Art: Lessons Learned.” Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.
• Seb Chan at the Powerhouse Museum also discusses Wikipedia and that the museum’s online documentation is now licensed under Creative Commons.
• The Smithsonian Institution (SI) tells us about Ray Strong painting the Golden Gate Bridge. See more at the SI’s Flickr group, 1934.
• Hat tip to the SI for this info on U.S. stimulus funding for research. Government money—It’s not just for Wall Street!
• The Library of Congress reports that the public-domain status of early sound recordings is delayed until 2067.
• The National Media Museum aims to open a London satellite for photography exhibits.
• The Bibliothèque de Toulouse posts a review of Jean-Paul Lilienfeld’s “The Day of the Skirt,” a broadcast about women, racism, and the integration of young people.
• The Australian War Memorial reports on the conservation of the Mark IV tank. Oooh, tanks.

Go Visit!

April – It’s Jazz Appreciation Month! Check out the Smithsonian’s offerings.

03 Apr. – Live webcast from the Smithsonian’s Chandra Observatory! Part of Around the World in 80 Telescopes.

03 Apr. – Charles Parker Day, from the National Media Museum.

Starting 03 Apr. – Film screenings in 200-seat Art Deco theater resume at Library of Congress Packard Campus. A Hard Day’s Night!

04 Apr. – Target First Saturday at the Brooklyn Museum—Swing-era tunes, French and Italian arias, dance, talks, and more.

04 Apr. – Join the National Galleries of Scotland for a selection of faces in the Portrait Gallery’s collection, including Mary Queen of Scots.

05 Apr. – Open day at the John Oxley Library (State Library of Queensland, Australia) in honor of its 75th birthday.

05 Apr. – Join the George Eastman House for a screening of Victor Fleming’s 1934 Treasure Island. Arrrrr.

Nominations are open for the top 10 silliest photos in the Commons!

Here’s a rich smattering of submissions, sure to make you giggle.

Striatic submitted this one of a monkey riding a rhino …

George Eastman House

… and Kevin gets a kick out of this Mr. Ed knock-off.

Nationaal Archief

Pennylrichardsca loves the James Montgomery Flagg series with the mannequin …

Library of Congress

and Anna thought the wombat was in control of this bike!

State Library of New South Wales

Roketpad thinks we enjoy making fun of cute or defenseless things …

National Media Museum

… but there’s room for the macabre, too.

Powerhouse Museum

And this one just has me all lit up.

State Archives of Florida

Go ahead, have a search of the Commons and enter your nominations now!

Peter Henry Emerson
A Spring Idyl, 1887
National Media Museum

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.

The most commented photo from each Commons institution, collected using data from Patrick Peccatte.

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…)

Chandra X-ray Observatory
RCW 108: Massive Young Stars Trigger Stellar Birth (A region of active star formation about 4,000 light years from Earth.), 2008
Smithsonian Institution: rcw108

Capping off Darwin’s 200th birthday anniversary, peer backwards in time, 4,000 light years away, to the formation of new stars.

Chandra is helping scientists better understand the hot, turbulent regions of space and answer fundamental questions about origin, evolution, and destiny of the Universe.

You can help map the stars! The National Maritime Museum is holding an Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition. They’ve teamed up with Astrometry.net too, to map all the photos in the group. Learn more here.

view + comment on Flickr

February 12, 2009, marks the 200th birthday anniversary of evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin. (Coincidentally, later this year will see the 150th anniversary of his book The Origin of Species.)

The National Media Museum of London has uploaded photographs from Darwin’s book The Expression of Emotions. That book, published in 1872, concerns how humans and non-human animals express their emotions. Written to refute the idea that humans were specially endowed with the facial muscles for expression, the photos are rather delightful.

‘Fear’ from ‘The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals’ London 1872. Charles Darwin (1809-1882) Yimhafiz says : “The lower photograph is a part of the photograph showing Dr Gillaume Benjamin Amand Duchenne (1806-1875) and his assistant performing their ‘Faradism’ experiment on a live subject. Dr. Gillaume Duchenne is considered as the father of the application of electricity in medicine.” Duchenne’s photos are in this same Human Expressions set on Flickr that these photos are in.

National Media Museum

‘Expressions of Suffering – Weeping’ The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, along with another book, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, was meant to questions of human origins and human psychology using Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection.

National Media Museum

‘Helplessness’ “With respect to our first Principle, it is notorious how powerful is the force of habit. The most complex and difficult movements can in time be performed without the least effort or consciousness.” —Darwin, p. 29

National Media Museum

‘Sneering and Defiance’ “… The young and the old of widely different races, both with man and animals, express the same state of mind by the same movements.” —Darwin

National Media Museum

‘Contempt’ “The most common method of expressing contempt is by movements about the nose, or round the mouth; but the latter movements, when strongly pronounced, indicate disgust. The nose may be slightly turned up, which apparently follows from the turning up of the upper lip; or the movement may be abbreviated into the mere wrinkling of the nose.” —Darwin, pp. 255–56

National Media Museum

‘Grief’ “AFTER the mind has suffered from an acute paroxysm of grief, and the cause still continues, we fall into a state of low spirits; or we may be utterly cast down and dejected. Prolonged bodily pain, if not amounting to an agony, generally leads to the same state of mind. If we expect to suffer, we are anxious; if we have no hope of relief, we despair.” —Darwin, p. 178

National Media Museum

‘Joy’ 7,000 copies of the first edition of this book were printed on November 26, 1872.

National Media Museum

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)