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Putting our image archive on Flickr?
Our colleagues at the National Museum of Health and Medicine (in DC) are right now experiencing a dramatically increasing traffic from all over the world to their unofficial Repository of Bottled Monsters blog. From about 100 views a day to 300 views an hour last week.
The reason for this stunning outreach success is that Wired.com and many other websites have spread the news about the NMHM staff’s work to put the museum’s picture archive on Flickr. In a few week’s time, more than half a million Flickr users have seen the exquisite collection of images, especially of American war medicine.
The US Army (which owns NMHM) are imposing a general ban on letting its employees and institutions have access to Flickr (and other social network sites), so the NMHM staff decided to put the pictures on Flickr from their home computers in their spare time.
Many other institutions already do this (in their working hours :-). For example the Smithsonian has a great photostream on Flickr Commons. So do Powerhouse, the National Galleries of Scotland, the Swedish National Heritage Board (two weeks ago), and many others. But what the NMHM example shows better than these is that a presence on the Commons can make a small institution and its blog blossom.
Here at Medical Museion we have so far been somewhat reluctant to think in these terms, not only because it’s a big and expensive operation to put our rich image archive online, but also because we are already getting some direly needed income from selling images.
But maybe we should put the image collection online for free? We will miss a few thousand DKK a year in monetary revenues, that’s right. But the good-will revenue from posting them in the public space, for example, under a Creative Commons license, will probably be much higher — and in the long run it might, as a side-effect, increase our overall revenues.
31 Mar 2009 Thomas
Putting online is one thing, using flickr is another.
You’re right, of course. We’ve discussed three options:
1) putting thumbnails online via our own website (like Wellcome Images)
2) flickr (like Smithsonian and others do)
3) some other public domain service
The problem with flickr, as I see it, is that you are then not in full control of stuff. Something in me opposes that. I’d much rather go for something were you have more control.
Putting collections of visual stuff on the net, with commenting, metadata/tagging etc, is actually quite easy today. For just two examples, check out
Pixelpost
Omeka
or maybe a collaboration with Wellcome?
One nice thing about Flickr is that you can control what size images the user can download–you could not make a very good print with a small, 72 DPI image (which is a perfect web size), so posting images on Flickr should not cut into the money you make from selling prints. If anything, it might improve your sales (as it did at the Dittrick, if I’m not mistaken?), as its a great way of increasing international awareness about your collection. Many people, including designers and art directors (including myself), use Flickr as a sort of stock image resource, and will contact image holders to see if they can get (or buy) a printing copy. Also, you can embed metadata into the files–this is what we did with the “Picturing the Museum” project at the American Museum of Natural History. That way, people who download these images can at least find the maker and the copyright information.
The Flickr community is vast, engaged, and respectful. I work on the Smithsonian’s photostream on Flickr and it’s been a great way to interact with and learn more about our visitors. It doesn’t replace our own web presence, however, it’s a great way to increase the public’s knowledge of the photo resources at the Smithsonian. Plus, they love to research and give us new ways to look at our collections.
thanks Gustav, Joanna and Effie for your supportive comments – will help us come to a conclusion in the near future.
Th
If your collections are not “out there” to be discovered online, you essentially do not exist to the world. Our web site does not have a space for online collections, so we turned to Flickr as a way to show the world what we have, as well as to show pictures of our museum and events. We didn’t have a particular strategy beyond trying to have a nice cross-section of objects and starting with things that would have high pop-culture value so we coudl get a foothold in searches. We posted images that are a nice size but not hi-res enough to use for print.
The results have been wonderful. We’ve had tens of thousands of views; people have commented on objects, “favorited” them, and posted them on blogs and in articles (with credits and links back to our Flickr page- people are quite good about that). Flickr allows for syndication of content; our images have thus begun to show up in search results on other sites that pull in Flickr photostreams. We have joined all manner of groups on Flickr, which gets word of our collections to people who we would not have been able to reach ordinarily, and we have been put in touch with other instututions that we were not connected to before. We’re also able to send our constituents and potential donors to Flickr to show them what we have and what we do. We’re a small organization, and what we’ve gotten from Flickr has made a difference. Our collections and images have finally been unlocked for the world to see.
Re: control over stuff: if you want your images to be out there, you don’t have any control, regardless of whether it’s on Flickr or your own site. We pay attention to who’s using the images–Flickr stats can show you that– and what sorts of comments and tagging come up. We’ve had no problems.
Daria: we mean different things when talking about control; you are thinking control over images once they’ve been downloaded by a user, I am thinking about control over the software used and owning your data in another sense.
I am sure Yahoo, the owner of flickr, is a great company and all that, but in the end flickr is just a proprietary platform run by a commercial company with agendas that are wider than supporting museum collections. They could become entangled in political processes that have nothing whatsoever to do with the Chemical Heritage Foundation but would still impact the way your pictures would be presented to the world. They could start downsizing staff working on The Commons or something similar. Say you put a lot of effort into publishing a substantial collection on flickr and they suddenly decide to change some functionality that you like. Who can predict where flickr will be in ten years time and whether Yahoo’s corporate culture then will be as easily combined with the needs of museum collections as it seems to be today?
If you run your own show you wouldn’t need to worry about these things. You would instead need to worry about stuff like buying webhosting and taking care of an installation of Omeka or Pixelpost or something similar, but that is not really rocket science, is it?
I experienced this problem, in a very small way, when I tried to migrate a couple of years’ worth of blog posts and comments from a proprietary platform to one that is open, transparent and equipped with full import/export possibilities run on my on web domain (i.e., Wordpress). It was impossible! I could get my posts but not the comments out of the clutches of the system, they were stuck.
I agree on that aspect of control completely. Flickr could disappear overnight, or a new service could come around that everyone flocks to instead. It’s unwise for an organization to use on a free service that you have no control over for something mission-critical, or to use Flickr as a substitute for well-done online collections/images on one’s own site. The next incarnation of our site will do that for us, and like the Smithsonian, while we’ll continue to use Flickr to make our images known to the masses- because right now, they’re far more likely to land on Flickr than our site- the authoritative collection will be on our site.
That said, a lot of places don’t have the money or staff to run their own show, and they have to rely on services like Flickr or hope for a partnership until they can do better on their own. For those folks, Flickr is a wonderful, accessible asset.
The advantage to Flickr is that it’s got a very large audience that it would be impossible for your local shop to recreate. We’ve had pictures up on the Museum’s website for years – people who really need them find them, but nobody else does. We stick them on Flickr and they’ve got hundreds of views in days. But the Wired article really drove this – we had 60,000 views for a year or so before that.
As Joanna says, you can set restrictions. We didn’t, BUT we also don’t put up the highest resolution images – 600dpi TIFS – which people still buy from us for publication. These are usually 24mb files.
I haven’t posted any stats lately, but we’re up past 750,000 views.
We hope to have our online catalogue up about a year from now. 3 of our 5 departments (historical, anatomical and archives) have been converted to KE Software’s Emu. I’d be glad to talk to anyone about it at MEMA or AAHM later this month.