Creating Technology for Social Change

Public archives and Flickr: Interview with Michelle Springer of the Library of Congress

Half dozen major government libraries, including the New York Public Library, the Dutch Nationaal Archief, and the State Library of New South Wales, all have something in common: they each have uploaded thousands of their archives’ photographs and associated metadata to the photo-sharing website Flickr for (nearly) unrestricted sharing, commenting, and collective tagging.

But the groundwork for these enterprises was laid by colleagues of Michelle Springer, Project Manager for Digital Initiatives at the U.S. Library of Congress.

Since January 2008, Springer has been shepherding a pilot program, uploading chosen collections to the Library of Congress’ Flickr site, including “The 1930s-40s in Color” and “News in the 1910s”. As her report on the pilot describes (www.loc.gov/rr/print/flickr_report_final.pdf), the results were impressive:

  • As of October 23, 2008, there have been 10.4 million views of the Library of Congress’ photos on Flickr.
  • The Library made 15,000 Flickr contacts.
  • 2,518 Flickr users added 67,176 tags to photos.
  • More than 500 of the Library’s records were enhanced with new information provided by Flickr users.
  • And visits to the Library’s Prints and Photographs Online Catalog increased 20% from January to May 2008 compared to the same period the year before.

But through a civic media lens, what does Springer expect the long-term effects of Flickr to be for major public libraries and the people they serve? I interviewed her by email in mid-December to get a better idea….

First some background…how did you come to the Library of Congress?

In 1985, while completing my Master of Library Science degree at UCLA, I was selected for the Library of Congress Special Recruit Program. It was a wonderful year where I got to work with units all over the Library. In 1986, I joined the Library’s Congressional Research Service as an Information Research Specialist, concentrating on legislative initiatives in the arts and education. My work became more Web focused, and in 2006 I moved to the Office of Strategic Initiatives’ Web Services Division to help develop new institutional policies that address the many Web 2.0 emerging technologies.

What was the goal of introducing Flickr? Were there any points when it felt like a tough sell?

The report goes into a lot of detail about how the pilot developed and the challenges that we were trying to address, but in a nutshell, we had three goals for the Library’s Flickr account: increase awareness by sharing photographs from the Library’s collections with people who enjoy images but might not visit the Library’s own Web site; gain a better understanding of how social tagging and community input could benefit both the Library and users of the collections; and gain experience participating in the emergent Web communities that would be interested in the kinds of materials in the Library’s collections.

The Flickr functionality was a very good fit for what we wanted to achieve except for the rights statement options. It wasn’t a “tough sell” internally, but we knew we had to resolve that issue or we could not move forward. Fortunately, Flickr was very willing to work with us on how we could offer a new rights statement that says “no known copyright restrictions,” and that made the project possible. It was George Oates, the project manager we worked closely with at Flickr, who saw the potential of what we wanted to do and established The Commons (www.flickr.com/commons), a special Flickr space where other institutions could participate in similar projects.

At what point did you know it was working well, particularly with regard to the Library’s public mission?

I don’t know that there was a single special moment, although the remarkably positive blogosphere community reaction of the first 48 hours (when the news about the Library’s Flickr account seemed to be everywhere) really made us feel that something special was happening, and that the success of the project might exceed our expectations. The opportunity to participate in a “virtual reading room” service is certainly gratifying and working well. As an example, a Flickr member who saw “Operating a hand drill at Vultee-Nashville, woman is working on a ‘Vengeance’ dive bomber, Tennessee”…

[Ed. note: Definitely worth it to click the photo to view embedded notes on its Flickr page.]

…commented that her “Grandma was a ’Rosie’ at the Vultee plant in Downey, CA,” and wondered if more photos might be available. We were able to point her towards the Prints and Photographs Online Catalog, where many black-and-white photographs taken at the Vultee plant can be seen.

The visual comments are also satisfying. Take a look at “Woman aircraft worker, Vega Aircraft Corporation, Burbank, Calif. Shown checking electrical assemblies”. Here a Flickr member added value by offering a pencil drawing of his grandmother in her protective gear as she worked as a WWII welder in California, with links to images of the grandmother’s termination letter and pay stubs for the welder work.

If you could pick one or two favorite photos from the Library of Congress’ Flickr collection, could you describe how do they speak to what Flickr can do for you, for viewers, and for the relationship between the Library (in the sense that it’s a government institution) and the public?

[Click photo to view embedded notes on Flickr page.]

This photo is a terrific example of the personal history and memories that these photos can evoke. The original caption was “Street in industrial town in Massachusetts.” Flickr members quickly identified the location, and the Library changed the title to Sylvia Sweets Tea Room, corner of School and Main streets, Brockton, Mass., both in the Flickr version and in the Prints and Photographs Online catalog. The Library also added a note to its own online catalog record for this picture (http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/fsac.1a33856) so that people are pointed to the constantly growing rich discussions out in Flickr.

Could you give an example of what you learned from someone who contributed tags, background, and other information?

Some of my personal favorite photos from the Bain collection are the four auto polo photographs:

[Click photo to view embedded notes on Flickr page.]

A Flickr member, lifeasdaddy, added links to a movie of the sport and discussions about it. Also, other members picked up on that fact that these photos were probably staged. Who knew?

Other state and national libraries have joined the Commons on Flickr. What have you learned from their efforts? For other archives interested in following your lead, what advice would you give? What would be the hurdles for other organizations?

George Oates did an amazing job of creating the Commons where diverse archives, libraries, and museums worldwide could share their collections with new audiences. It’s a long-standing dream to unite historical photographs in a big pool in order to represent as many subjects and perspectives as possible. So it’s been reassuring to see how well images from different institutions fit together as we serve up our visual banquets.

As far as advice, I would refer them to our report, especially the section on resources. Different institutions are going to view the risks and rewards through their own lens.

Shelley Bernstein at the Brooklyn Museum has posted a series of reports on their experience and Seb Chen of the Power House Museum has described their project. Anyone interested in the Commons might also be interested in checking out the various threads on the Flickr Commons discussion group that just launched recently at http://www.flickr.com/groups/flickrcommons/, a Flickr community created group to discuss all aspects of commons collections.

If the Library’s presence on Flickr were to increase dramatically, what new opportunities and challenges do you foresee?

Expansion of Library contributions to the Commons will depend on the resources that can be allocated over the long term. As more collections are added, the interaction on items initially loaded does not disappear, so the amount of content to moderate increases. Answering questions, preparing new collections for load, updating the image descriptions—all these activities require resources and no one works full time on this project. Were more resources available we could also interact with Flickr members in many more ways, like setting up subject-based groupings of the photos. I guess you can tell that we would like to see the Commons continue!

In this whole process, what surprised you most?

Two things. First, the imaginative variety of engagement with the photographs was a wonderful surprise. We are very impressed with the quality of history detective work, the contributions from experts in everything from cooking to aviation, the additions of ‘how it looks today’ photos, the moving family histories, the great sense of humor, the congenial discussions of historical events, and more. Second, the launch of the Library account and The Commons was publicized initially by joint blog posts on the Flickr blog and the Library of Congress Blog (www.loc.gov/blog), and almost immediately we saw it picked up by corporate, media, and private individual’s blogs, and reported as something extraordinary. Selected links to the coverage are listed in an appendix in the report, but that list doesn’t begin to approach the number of web pages with messages about our account in that first few weeks. While the speed with which the message traveled was unexpected, the expression by the blog community that it was extraordinary that the Library of Congress was participating in a project like this was not something the pilot team had anticipated.