Put up the bunting and hang the banners and pennants, we’re welcoming the Reykjavík Museum of Photography to the Flickr Commons community. Their first uploads are by photographer Magnús Ólafsson, documenting early-twentieth-century life and culture in Iceland, including streetscapes, artists at work, and women doing laundry. There are also several stereoscopes of Icelandic landscapes included in this first batch. Velkomin, Ljósmyndasafn Reykjavíkur!

Magnús Ólafsson
Reykjavík, Iceland, Buildings, clothes store. Edinborg store in Hafnarstræti 2-4, decorated in the occasion of the Danish king´s visit, 1907
Ljósmyndasafn Reykjavíkur / The Reykjavík Museum of Photography:MAÓ 157

view + comment on Flickr

SMU Libraries: Practicing outside the arsenal, Mexico City

TSA: Caddo Lake State Park – Entrance Portal

Today we welcome to the Commons two Texas institutions:

Southern Methodist University’s SMU Central University Libraries brings to the Commons a wealth of imagery from both Texas and Mexico, including images from the Civil War and the Mexican Revolution and double photographs that include the backs of photographs – and of an eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

The Texas State Archives debuts in the Commons with something different: maps and architectural plans drawn by the Civilian Conservation Corps, covering four state parks. The inclusion of artists’ names is a rich bonus!

Please join us in bidding a big hello to Texas!

Jacob Kalich (second left) in Mezrach und Maarev, 1921

Please join me in welcoming to the Commons the New York-based Center for Jewish History. The Center is home to five different institutions — the American Jewish Historical Society, the American Sephardi Federation, the Leo Baeck Institute, Yeshiva University Museum, and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research — and brings to the Commons a wealth of photographs of events, people, and artifacts from all five.

If you know your Jewish history or have Jewish family, you might be able to help identify people and places in the Center’s images, too. Recognize any of the three boy actors in the Yiddish-theatre photograph above, for example?

Even if you don’t, please drop by and wish the Center brukhim ha-bo’im!

Upper Arlington Red Cross Unit, 1918

You might not know much not know much now about Upper Arlington, Ohio, but once you’ve spent some time with Upper Arlington History’s richly described Commons collection, you’ll start to feel like a local. And if you do know Upper Arlington or the people whose faces we see from there, we’d like to hear what you can add to the story!

Welcome to the Commons, UA Archives!

Seniors dancing, Tifereth B'nai Jacob Synagogue, North Minneapolis, 1950?

Now that Passover has ended, we greet the spring with a new Commons member: the Jewish Historical Society of the Upper Midwest (JHSUM), “encompassing Jewish history of Minnesota, the Dakotas, Northern Wisconsin and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula”. The JHSUM starts off with a bang — or at least a lively dance — with 517 Minnesota photographs from the Steinfeldt Photograph Collection, “depicting Jewish family and community life in the Upper Midwest from the 1880s to the present.”

Join us in saying to the JHSUM, baruch haba!

PM Walkabout (Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson at a National Coal Board gala in Wakefield, 17th June 1967

The National Archives UK brings to the Commons selections from the 900 years of history it holds — from official Khartoum expedition photographer Felice Beato’s 1880s photographs from Egypt and the Sudan to wartime propoganda posters to Sir Henry Cole’s Rat, with stops on the way for medieval illuminations, child prisoners of the 19th century, and maps and plans both useful and fanciful. They’re curating on Flickr, too!

Come say hello to the National Archives UK!

Skier making a cornice jump near Edith Creek, Mount Rainier

What better way to make a landing in the Flickr Commons in late February 2010 — midway through the Winter Olympics — than with winter sports? The University of Washington (UW) Digital Collections made a strong landing today, with a particular focus on skiing. Skiing isn’t your thing? Perhaps you prefer snowshoeing, curling, sliding, or something like biathlon! And the view? Stunning!

Welcome to the Commons, UW!

Ansel Adams, Boulder with hill in background, "Rocks at Silver Gate, Yellowstone National Park," Wyoming

New to the Commons today – but with months of uploads to contribute – is the U.S. National Archives. Thanks to President Franklin Roosevelt’s foresightedness and the Archives’ persistence in the difficult job of selecting from the vast quantity of material produced by the U.S. Government every year that portion which will be “of continuing value“, the U.S. National Archives’ Commons collection is already almost 4,000 images strong.

And what a collection it is – nearly 500 photographs by the great Civil War photographer Mathew Brady; a wide-ranging selection of photographs from the Environmental Protection Agency’s 1970s photography project DOCUMERICA, organized by photographer; 220 photographs, made available today, by the incomparable Ansel Adams; and so much more.

Don’t want to miss what’s next? Add the U.S. National Archives to your Flickr contacts, or the RSS feed of their photostream page to your feed reader.

A warm midwinter welcome to the Commons to Norway’s second biggest public library, the Bergen Public Library. The Bergen Public Library’s music-related archives form the core of its first uploads to the Commons on Flickr, featuring composer Edvard Grieg, violinist Ole Bull — and their friends and family:

The Bergen Music fest, group picture with Edvard Grieg

We’re delighted to note the arrival in the Commons of the LSE Library, a.k.a. the British Library of Political & Economic Science, home to the research collection of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

The LSE Library kicks things off this week with a lens onto its own over-a-century-long history and with some non-photographic archival treats: British and Soviet political posters.

Welcome to the Commons!

HM Queen Mother at the formal opening of the new library in the Lionel Robbins Building, 10th July 1979