Here at Indicommons, we’ve been following the Museums and the Web 2010 conference in Denver, Colorado, via Twitter. Here’s a short round-up of papers of interest to The Commons being presented there this week.

Buckets and Vessels by Aaron Straup Cope:

With the mass of digital “stuff” growing around us every day and simple tools for self-organization evolving beyond individuals into communities of suggestions, is the curatorial prerogative itself becoming a social object?

This paper examines the act of association, the art of framing and the participatory nature of robots in creating artifacts and story-telling in projects like Flickr Galleries, the API-based Suggestify project (which provides the ability to suggest locations for other people’s photos) and the increasing number of bespoke (and often paper-based) curatorial productions.

Aaron also led a workshop called Machine Tags: Theory, Working Code and Gotchas (and Robots!)

Common Ground: A Community-Curated Meetup Case Study by Paula Bray and Ryan Donahue:

Why do institutions and on-line communities want to participate in face-to-face meetups such as Common Ground: a community curated meetup? Does this type of experience provide a deeper engagement with audiences and give institutions an opportunity to learn from these experiences? What are we finding in the process?

Can Structured Metadata Play Nice with Tagging Systems? Parsing New Meanings from Classification-Based Descriptions on Flickr by Joseph B. Dalton:

This paper discusses the rationale behind NYPL’s decision to combine existing metadata – in the form of subject headings – with user-generated tags, and demonstrates some of the challenges, benefits and drawbacks for institutions that may be interested in using similar approaches for their own collections.

Flickr as Platform: Astronomy Photographer of the Year by Fiona Romeo and Natasha Waterson:

Variously described as “wonders of the cosmos” (Daily Mail, 2009l) and “the best space porn of the year” (Davis, 2009), Astronomy Photographer of the Year is an annual competition and exhibition organised by the Royal Observatory, Greenwich.

This paper will outline how we used the Flickr platform to reach new visitors, build a community of practice, develop an innovative standard for identifying and locating astronomy photographs (’astrotagging’), shortlist and judge competition entries, develop an on-gallery interactive showcasing all contributed photographs, and repurpose user-generated content for exhibition labels.

According to Flickr’s developers, “the integration is so seamless… you might as well consider Flickr to be their ‘backend’ serve.” (Kandalgaonkar, 2009).

Museum Commons. Tragedy or Enlightened Self-Interest? This last paper of interest has no true connection with The Commons on Flickr, however it raises and answers a fundamental question regarding the concept of a museum commons.

There has been an exciting surge of interest in the museum sector in expanding access to museum data through the classic idea of creating a commons. A Web-based multi-institutional museum commons could open up public access to collections, deepening contextual knowledge of objects and helping museum professionals recognize the unseen value of their own collections. For example, collections items that seem orphaned or fragmentary in one institution may enjoy a rich life on-line, once reunited with relevant collections and data from other institutions in an on-line commons environment. Commons-oriented intellectual property policies should also enable content sharing for educational and other non-commercial uses, or they may be used to facilitate new innovations or for-profit businesses beyond the scope of traditional rights-and-reproductions activities.

You might also enjoy scrolling back through the social media advice (@edmj/museum-socialmedia-advice) from MW2010’s unconference tweets!

There are plenty more papers to read; we’d love to hear what words of wisdom you found in them!

view + comment on Flickr

Powerhouse Museum

Bordoni

Library of Congress

Yasuo Kuniyoshi, photographed by Peter A. Juley & Son

Smithsonian Institution

Ida Fieldman, March 1945

Jewish Women’s Archive

Bath attendant Stella, Lysekil, Sweden

Swedish National Heritage Board

Laplander

New York Public Library

Ella Wesner, male impersonator

George Eastman House

Miss Estelle Doray, snowshoer, Montreal, Quebec, 1924

Musée McCord Museum

A child dressed in uniform, 1915

Australian War Memorial

Add the portraits you’ve found in The Commons to the Flickr Commons discussion group thread for portraits.

Anna Atkins (1799-1871) is represented in the Commons by her Photographs of British Algae, found as a set in the New York Public Library’s Flickr stream. Atkins studied science as her father’s assistant and made illustrations of shells for his 1823 translation of Lamarck’s book on the subject. She collected botanical samples, and through both her father and her husband came to know William Fox Talbot, inventor of the negative/positive process. By about 1841 she had access to a camera, but she’s best known for her 1843-45 cyanotypes (sunprints) of algae specimens. She collaborated with another woman, Anne Dixon (1799-1864), on other albums of botanical cyanotypes.

Fucus nodosus (1843-53), New York Public Library

Mary Dillwyn (1816-1906) was also acquainted with William Fox Talbot through family networks: her older brother John Dillwyn Llewelyn (himself a photographer) married Talbot’s cousin Emma. Mary was using a small camera in the early 1850s, and made a specialty of rather informal portraits for the time. After she married a clergyman in 1857, she gave up photography. Her work is to be found in the LIGC-NLW (National Library of Wales) Flickr stream, including this self-portrait from 1853.

Mary Dillwyn M.D. 1853 [self-portrait], LIGC-NLW (National Library of Wales)

Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879), who was raised in India, only started taking pictures at age 48, in 1863, when someone gave her a camera as a gift. Through her sister, she knew Tennyson and other writers and artists, and drew from their work in her subjects and poses. Cameron was also forward-thinking enough to get each of her images registered with the copyright office. She continued to make photographs when she moved back to Ceylon in 1875, but it was hard to get the necessary supplies there. The George Eastman House and the National Media Museum Flickr streams both include examples of Cameron’s work.

Ophelia Study No. 2, 1867, George Eastman House

Baby “Pictet”, 1863, National Media Museum

Elizabeth Rigby Eastlake (1809-1893) wasn’t herself a photographer. She was an art critic who wrote one of the first and most influential essays about photography as an art form, in 1857, declaring that “[p]hotography is intended to supercede much that art has hitherto done, but only that which it was both a misappropriation and a deterioration of Art to do.” She was married to Sir Charles Eastlake, the first president of the Royal Photographic Society. A Hill and Adamson portrait of Lady Eastlake (an early subject of photography as well as an early supporter) c. 1845 can be found in the Flickr stream of the National Galleries of Scotland.

Hill and Adamson, Lady Elizabeth (Rigby) Eastlake, 1809-1893. Writer, c. 1845, National Galleries of Scotland