NMeM praises Flickr Collaboration

[Michael Pritchard]

The National Media Museum has praised its collaboration with Flickr, the online photograph sharing website...Joanna Drag reported in the British Journal of Photography. The full article is available by clicking here. Part of the article is reproduced below: --- Initially started by the US Library of Congress and Flickr in January 2008, the project aims to give the public easier access to thousands of archived photographs while helping the library to categorise them through Flickr’s photo tagging system, in effect harnessing the power of social networks. The initiative was expanded to other institutions such as the National Media Museum in Bradford, who joined The Commons in August 2008. ‘Internally, we felt that the National Media Museum, with its web remit, needed to be in the vanguard of museums on the “social web”, and The Commons fulfilled this aim perfectly,’ says senior online marketing executive for the museum, Peer Lawther. ‘We didn’t want it to be a purely commercial or promotional opportunity but rather an opportunity for us to utilise the vast curatorial knowledge we hold and to use The Commons to show some of the breadth of our holdings.’ Since joining the project, the three initial groups of images made available online by the museum has received over 400,000 views. The groups consist of Peter Henry Emerson’s ‘Pictures from a life in Fields and Fen’ (1887), a selection of Kodak No.1 circular photos (c.1890) and a set of ‘Spirit’ photographs taken by William Hope (c.1920). ‘The Commons has confounded our expectations,’ says Lawther. ‘We’ve been featured on hundreds of blogs, “friended” thousands of fellow photographers and chatted with countless fans about our work. In showing discrete selections from our collection we’ve received a huge amount of goodwill from the community.’ To find photographs or to get more information visit flickr.com/commons