Thing 10: Photosharing/Flickr

Hello archivist friends.

This week poses many new challenges to Web 2.0 use (i.e., I did not have a Flickr account either).  The reasons are manifold, but primarily hinge on the fact that my professional photographs are few.  I am interested to see how archives and museums are using their Flickr accounts (primarily for publicity purposes?).  My personal photos have been stored on a very large social network that shall remain Faceless, since I first went digital in college.  As we talked about on our jaunt through social networking, it seems cumbersome for me to, at this time, reinvent myself professionally on social networks (as an individual I mean-- I think establishing an institutional presence on a social network is important) by creating multiple accounts for the same venue.  That's what LinkedIn is for, no?  But, similar to with my inquiry into the personal/professional line during professional networking (I shared a link to a LinkedIn string about keeping networking identities at least relatively separate) I (and everyone else, I am sure) have decided that mixing social and professional genres in photographs is equally laden with potential for faux pas.  Thus, and forgive my serpentine route to this practically inevitable conclusion-- Tweeters, gasping-- I suppose creation of another account was necessary.  I have never used Flickr, though I know a few who have.

So far I like the U.S. National Archives photostream a lot.  Check out the newly-posted 1923 Hemingway passport photo!  Let's face it-- we are mostly book and/or history nerds, and we find this stuff incredible.  Segue: has anyone ever been to the Hemingway House in Key West?  It's a fascinating place.  Disclaimer: don't go if you're allergic to cats.

There are many intricacies and corners of Flickr to explore, of course.  So far I like that images can be user-tagged, or tagged by viewers.  I like that images can be saved as favorites without needing to be copied and/or saved.  I also like that there are many groups based on some sort of intellectual or thematic relationship, and individual photographs can be uploaded to these groups from outside accounts.

I have reservations (as always) about the effectiveness of user tagging.  This debate has raged through libraries and, to some extent, archives, regarding their bibliographic holdings, online catalogs, etc.  User tags continue to be both useful in that they can create a better picture of the intellectual material of a resource (where a MARC record might not, as well), and facilitate access and use.  On the other hand, tags are interpretive, and vague, and often disjointed, etc.  You know the deal.  So-- there's that.  I love how the NYPL archives approached this problem:

"NYPL librarians have already spent a ton of time describing many of these photos, particularly with subject headings that relate the contents of the images. Rather than discard this information, we've added a selection of these headings, repurposed as tags, as a nucleus for everyone else to build from. The hope is that this will stimulate rather than stifle activity on the Commons, with librarians and non-librarians collaborating on the description of this material. "  -from their profile on Flickr

Though I liked the user guidelines to Flickr encouraging the community feel and the honest use of work, there is not really anything stopping someone from pulling these photos down.  They are, at least according to the user agreement, theoretically safe from reposting on Flickr (under the threat of account revocation).  However, they can still be downloaded or saved.  The NYPL, for example, states that "The NYPL Digital Gallery provides free and open access to over 640,000 images digitized from the The New York Public Library's vast collections" (from their Flickr profile, also), but for a smaller, private institution, does photo sharing increase visibility but also potentially endanger property, copyright, etc.?  I wonder if Flickr has a watermarking option, or if this has to be done on on photo editing software ahead of time.  I am curious about these things.

The share potential on a site like this is phenomenal, however.  And, if an institution has the resources to digitize photographs on a large scale, this seems like a wonderful (well connected!) venue on which to do so.  Does it also promote the "needle in a haystack" search, though?  Are images just lost on here?  Perhaps this is inevitable.  I can see the appeal though-- this is a photographic networking site.  I am curious what everyone else thinks about this.  Thoughts, folks?