What groups of photographs should we post on Flickr next, and why?
The NARA photostream on Flickr launched in July. So far, the pilot project includes photographs and their corresponding descriptions from the Women’s Bureau, the Environmental Protection Agency’s DOCUMERICA project, and a variety of “NARA Favorites,” plus links to each image’s ARC record. It’s been great to see the public participation up to this point. (Check out the fascinating link a viewer posted on one of our War Relocation Authority photos!) We’d love to hear your suggestions on what ARC images should go up next.
You should post photographs portraying great moments of American diplomacy and foreign relations.
You should publish photos where you can get help from the community identifying people and places!
How about some labor movement photos or documents in light of the upcoming Labor Day weekend?
Great idea, Eira! Keep an eye on Flickr over the next week to see some of our favorite labor-related photos!
In case this isn’t already in the works, has anyone asked the regions and the presidential libraries to provide “staff favorites” that they know the public would find most interesting? For exampke, Buffalo Bill and Walt Disney in Kansas City; Kent State and the frisbee case in Chicago; 70s Busing riots in Boston; Prohibition in Seattle; Bonnie and Clyde in Fort Worth; civil rights in Atlanta; Batman and the Rosenberg case in NYC; railroads in Denver; slavery and some of the Founding Fathers in Philadelphia.
Just some thoughts to consider!
Kelly in Kansas,
We have talked to the regions and presidential libraries about highlighting their records. I like your idea of having it feature “staff favorites.”
Thanks!
I would love to see some improvements to the Flickr commenting interface first. Many of the LOC photos on Flickr now have hundreds of comments, most of them chaff. “Nice photo!” “Cute hair!” etc. Buried somewhere a hundred comments down someone actually adds useful metadata to the photo–but try and find the useful comment!
I blogged about the problem here:
“”Lick This”: LOC, Flickr, and the Limits of Crowd Sourcing”:
http://northwesthistory.blogspot.com/2009/06/lick-this-loc-flickr-and-limits-of.html
I noticed there was no response to Phryxe’s question (September 3, 2009). You have 23 unidentified collections with photographs. Have you thought of posting portions of these collections on Flickr for identification purposes? I assume that none of these collections have collection files. There is no extent listed for these collections either, so are these a dozen photographs per collection or something in the hundreds? If there are no manuscripts with these photographs, might it be possible that photographs have gotten separated from collections you have already processed and that a subject search in your collections (assuming you could identify some images) might point to matching provenance? For example, one unidentified collection has a photograph autographed to a member of Congress (I believe), Richard Bird. I assume this photograph might have been part of a collection of records donated by Richard Bird’s estate or office.
Hi Patricia – Thanks for your suggestion. I checked in our catalog to see if the photographs in the unidentified collections have been digitized. It appears that the majority of the records aren’t digitized at this point in time. The subjects of most of the photographs in the unidentified collections are known. The collections are “unidentified” because they come from unknown donors. To see the series titles of the records within the unidentified collections, you can search “Unidentified Collection” (using the quotes) in our online catalog, click on the title of the collection, and then click on the series link.
-Rebecca