Democratising History: Evaluating PictureAustralia’s Flickr Pilot Project

‘tttallis’
Helicopter Water-Bombing at Phegan's Bay 2006

H.J. Shearman
Bridge Opening 1932
This photo of the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1932, taken from Balls Point, was posted on Flickr by the photographer's son, Don Shearman

'Pizzodisevo'
Australia 1959 Corner Queen St. - Albert St Brisbane
The image above has been posted by Pizzodisevo, an Italian man who lived in Australia in the 1950s and
has since
re-emigrated to Italy. Pizzodisevo is now in his eighties and wanted to record his images
into PictureAustralia

‘Let’s Take Over’
Corner Albert St and Queen St Mall, Brisbane, July 2006
‘Lets Take Over’ has picked up on Pizzodisevo's photo and provided a view of the same location today

Helen Morgan
Dr Phillip Law 2006

Kent Johnson
Pink Flamingo 2006
Winter Magic Festival 2006, Katoomba, Australia
The PictureAustralia Flickr pilot project enables all individuals to add their personal photographs to PictureAustralia. The project is a partnership between the Library’s PictureAustralia service and Yahoo’s Flickr photo sharing service. Two Flickr groups, PictureAustralia: Australia Day and PictureAustralia: People, Places and Events were set up on the Flickr website in January 2006. Images loaded into these groups are harvested on a weekly basis into PictureAustralia’s collection. The project has offered the Library a unique means to access a diverse collection of images of national significance produced by individual Australians.
The project has definitely met its two objectives:
-
Increase the number of contemporary images in PictureAustralia:
Researchers can now find over 12 000 contemporary images from Flickr in PictureAustralia. These images have been contributed by more than 500 people into PictureAustralia’s two Flickr groups. Approximately a thousand new images are added each month. - Engage with new audiences:
There has been an enormous positive reaction to the project by the public and by the national and international library community. The project was recently presented as a case study at a Creative Commons Summit in Rio de Janeiro and as an audio visual spot at the Internet Librarians Conference in Canada. Emails asking for more information on the project have been received from around the world, including the Luxembourg National Library and the Royal School of Information and Library Science in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Feedback from Flickr members has also been overwhelmingly positive:
Congratulations on a wonderful initiative which is beneficial to present and future generations. The images give society the world over the opportunity to view past Australian life/society and cultural events which have shaped the nation. I was absolutely delighted to see my Grandparents and Great-grandparents’ photos have been preserved for the future. (PictureAustralia Flickr survey respondent)
Monthly referral statistics on which collections are being accessed reveals that researchers’ awareness of the Flickr collection within PictureAustralia is steadily expanding.
The project has established important new partnerships for the Library, as feedback from Yahoo! staff confirm:
The actual initiative was a great success from an internal perspective, as it gave us an innovative, creative and newsworthy platform to demonstrate Flickr to consumers. The reaction and feedback we had from all levels of Yahoo!7 management was that it was a great case example of a third party content partnership and we would definitely welcome any future potential partnerships with the NLA.
Byproducts
A national marketing campaign in collaboration with Yahoo! created a huge spike in site visitation for PictureAustralia. A comparison of web statistics from January 2005 and January 2006 reveals a 43% increase in page views on the PictureAustralia site. This increase has been maintained and even increased during the eleven months since the project began. This enormous increase in profile of the service is related to the combined effect of both the Flickr project and the launch of the Libraries Australia free service, and has undoubtedly expanded the services’ audience nationally and internationally. The project has also benefited PictureAustralia’s 45 contributing agencies as new audiences discover the wealth of these collections while searching for their own Flickr images within PictureAustralia.
The PictureAustralia Flickr collection
By encouraging and supporting community contribution to PictureAustralia, the Library has gained a new collection covering events of national importance. The following is a selection of examples.
Individuals on the location of major events have the advantage of bringing the news as it happens.
Unexpectedly, the project has brought more heritage images into PictureAustralia as people open up their own personal image archives.
The inclusion of contemporary images has set up many fascinating juxtapositions between past and present histories within PictureAustralia, creating organic social histories.
Some Flickr members have intentionally created new images that reference PictureAustralia’s collection and link with other parts of the Library’s collections. People are now re-photographing city scenes or people found to be in historical photographs already in our in collection. They are using PictureAustralia’s collection as an archive of the everyday, open for reinvention in new and ever evolving contexts. This process brings together two supposedly antithetical processes: invention and historicism.
This image of Antarctic researcher Dr Phillip Law, now aged in his 90s, references images of him as a younger man already in PictureAustralia. This image is creating crucial links across time by back-shadowing to images of Law already collected, side-shadowing the recent acquisition of Law’s diaries by the National Library of Australia, and foreshadowing the use of this image for the benefit of future researchers.
The interactive Flickr environment has provided us with the opportunity to contact photographers in other groups and encourage them to upload their images to PictureAustralia’s groups, thereby filling gaps in the collection. Significant images of the World Cup and Cyclone Larry’s damage of Australia’s banana plantations have been added to the collection in this way.
The inclusion of colour images from Flickr in a largely black-and-white collection is extremely important and beneficial to the promotion of the whole PictureAustralia service.
Issues
Once born-digital collections are assembled, they face similar management issues to other collections in term of preservation, record-keeping, rights management, accessibility, interpretation and use. The pilot has highlighted issues in metadata quality, preservation, mediation, authorship, privacy and image quality. As part of the Library’s evaluation of the pilot project, a number of procedures have been implemented that address these issues. These include:
- emailing Flickr contributors and asking them to carefully title and tag their images, as these become searchable fields in PictureAustralia
- suggesting to group members that they select creative commons licenses for their images such as Attribution-Noncommercial licences, which allows others including PictureAustralia to display the work for non-commercial purposes
- promoting the project on the National Library’s website or in public presentations, providing the creator is attributed
- adding information to PictureAustralia’s group descriptions, providing members with information to have their images considered for acquisition by a PictureAustralia contributor.
The National Library of Australia has already acquired some Flickr images for the collection and regularly checks the PictureAustralia groups for documentary images. The Flickr images acquired by the Library will be preserved in the Pictures Collection for perpetuity.
The eagerness with which Australians in electronic communities have sought to access, engage with and contribute to their public collections suggests that people want active participation in the work of their public cultural institutions. The success of this project mirrors recent analysis of media trends which indicate people are now seeking to personalise media and become active participants. People want engagements with others and access to safe forums to discuss issues to do with images and recording history. The PictureAustralia Flickr pilot has been a successful and relatively easy-to implement project that is ‘putting the library in the flow of users’ (Dempsey, 2006).
Thinking on history and its teaching has recently undergone radical change. The Flickr project is helping PictureAustralia to capture both past and present reflections of Australia and its people. In that context the Flickr pilot project has provided the Library access to a diverse range of contemporary images that enables political and social analysis of the impact of past and contemporary themes on Australian culture and daily life. The project has made crucial links between media, culture and technology.
To find out how to add your images to the public record visit http://www.pictureaustralia.org/contribute/individual.html.
Fiona Hooton
Resource Sharing