From Photo Albums to Photo Sharing: How Many Pictures of Trees Are There?

Another week of "Twenty-three Things for Archivists" has just about gone past me. I will admit that I am having trouble keeping up with everything, so this week's post may be short. I bet this is common in the world of blogs--people just get busy and after the initial excitement start to drift away from it. I am still here and trying to compose a new post each week. This week our assignment was to explore photo sharing sites like Flickr, to post some photographs on Flickr (or a competitor's service), and to explore geo-tagging.

I have been familiar with Flickr for some time through friends that have used it. I found it a great way to view photographs from friends in Europe especially. My first realization that archives were using it to share photographs came when I was exploring the website,"Interactive Archivist," http://www.lib.byu.edu/sites/interactivearchivist/ and trying to learn more about Web 2.0. I discovered some articles that talked about experiences at some other universities, and I started exploring their sites. We were facing a 100th anniversary at our university, and my memories of the demand for photographs during the 75th anniversary led me to the conclusion that placing historical photographs of the university on Flickr for people to view and download would be a WONDERFUL idea. So, our journey began into the Web 2.0 world of photosharing. One of our archivists was given the task to create the Flickr site for our University Archives. We have three sets of photographs, over two hundred images, up so far.

This semester, a graduate student studying to be an archivist, approached us about a final project of creating a Flickr site for some of our Appalachian photographs. She wants to focus her project on the tagging and folksonomies and the question of users creation of sets--taking the photographs out of the original context. I agreed to let her use us as a guinea pig, so we are venturing into another Flickr experiment. We want to explore the use of Creative Commons licensing and users adding tags to the photographs.

Do I have doubts about all this? Yes. The archivist and librarian in me would prefer controlled, detailed descriptions such as could be done with ContentDM. The practical side of me realizes that we do not have time to create catalog level descriptions for our photographs. The adventurous part of me realizes that many of our users, such as our rail enthusiasts, know much more about our photographs than we do. Browsing through the public institutional photographs that are in "The Commons" on Flickr, I could see the best of both worlds. The detailed cataloging information in the description and the tags applied by viewers of the images. In many cases, the natural language in the tags applied provided a "richer description" and more possibilities of discovery by users for uses that the archivists perhaps could ever imagine.

When I explored geo-tagging, I was frustrated. I put up some of my own photographs using the Creative Commons licensing and applied geo-tags to some of them. My photostream on Flickr can be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/coveofthedoe and contains Appalachian landscape shots taken during the past year. Applying the geo-tags through the map was not difficult. I have used the searching capability of the map when I just want to look at some pretty pictures. I discovered that there must either be delay time before the geo-tagged items appear or I didn't do the tagging right. I could not find my photographs through the map. I also found lots of photographs of North Carolina in Tennessee. I also worried about telling the world where photos were taken on a map and would not use it for many images.

I am anxious to see how all of this will look in a few more years. So much is changing in such a short time. It makes me wonder just how many pictures of trees are there? Search the Flickr map and you will know that there are probably more than we need, but I have certainly taken my share. Frankly, it all makes me long for retirement