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PictureAustralia and the flickr Effect

Table set for Australia Day lunch in Burwood, Melbourne by Helen Morgan (Image PA no 91271008)

The Night Time View of Surfers Paradise by Richard Giles (Image PA no 78380920)

Mohawked Crowd Some kids at Sydney 's Big Day Out, a travelling music festival by Daniel Boud (Image PA no 94743687)

Cockies – a wet misty day in the mountains won't dampen the spirit of the cockies!
by Simon62

PictureAustralia has expanded though an exciting partnership between the National Library of Australia and Yahoo!7’s flickr.

Titled Click and Flick, the initiative enables individuals to contribute their images to PictureAustralia (www.pictureaustralia.org) through Yahoo!7’s flickr, an online image repository where over two million users can store and share their photos and interact with others (www.flickr.com). Up until now, PictureAustralia provided access only to images from collecting institutions such as libraries, galleries archives and museums.

Anyone can add their photos to two groups within flickrPictureAustralia: Australia Day and PictureAustralia: People, Places and Events.

The PictureAustralia: Australia Day group was used to launch the initiative in January 2006. This image (above), by Helen Morgan captures some of the excitement surrounding that event.

PictureAustralia: People, Places and Events has been the most popular group. This group contains many striking images illustrating the look, feel and changing moods of Australia and its people. This brooding image (opposite) of Surfers Paradise at night, taken from a hotel room, is one example of the exceptional quality of many of the images provided.

The metadata and thumbnail images from both groups are harvested weekly from flickr into PictureAustralia’s collection. As a partner of PictureAustralia, flickr is now an open door for individuals to help build the nation’s visual record. For more information on how to add your own images to PictureAustralia, visit www.pictureaustralia.org/flickr.html.

Click and Flick has provided the National Library with the means to increase the number of contemporary images in PictureAustralia and to engage with new audiences. Australians have quickly caught on to the concept and have already loaded more than 2000 images. Feedback from flickr members is full of congratulations for the Library taking this initiative.

A national marketing campaign has promoted the project in newspapers and on Australian radio. Enticed by Yahoo! Australian celebrities Andrew Gee (co-host of Australian Idol) and pop star Jade McCrae contributed their photos from the Australia Day concert at Parliament House, Canberra, to our Australia Day Group. The strategy has resulted in a huge increase in visits to PictureAustralia.

A plethora of weblogs discussing the project indicates the level of interest the project has generated nationally and internationally in the library and technology communities.

Lorcan Dempsey, in his weblog http://orwblog.oclc.org/archives/000916.html eloquently summarises the significance of this new approach, “The project has put the library in the user environment, rather than expecting the user to be in the library environment.”

Click and Flick is helping PictureAustralia to capture both past and present reflections of Australia and its people. The future is also heralded in this innovative use of emerging social software. The project signals the implications and opportunities provided by creative commons for the collecting practices of cultural agencies. In addition it suggests the eagerness with which Australians within electronic communities have sought to access, engage and contribute to their public collections. Either way the Library’s Click and Flick project continues to gather airspeed.

Fiona Hooton