Note: This is part III in a series. Read part I and part II.
Flickr
When it comes to museums and social networking, Flickr is where the action is and should continue to be. Unlike Facebook and MySpace, where visitors can leave notes or comments, Flickr allows people to actively create the core content in what Flickr calls a “photostream” or “set.” And besides, people like pictures! Some people may feel intimidated by new media terms like blogs, Facebook, and MySpace (as well as our attempts to define them), but “photo sharing” is, in the industrialized world at least, just about universally understandable.
To say museumfolk have been thinking about Flickr is an understatement. We’re crazy about it, it seems, and there’s a ton of good writing about using Flickr. Accordingly, I’m going to create a handy-dandy link list here, and you can visit those articles and Flickr pages that most interest you, ‘K?
Meditations on Flickr
Bath Kanter reported in March 2007 about some recent projects by museums in Flickr.
Francesca of Making Conversation with Museums reports on Tate’s use of Flickr. You can read more about the How We Are Now: Photographing Britain project at the Tate’s website.
Nina Simon of Museum 2.0 gives us five reasons museums should use Flickr.
Jim Spadaccini writes about Flickr mashups as well as about one of Ideum’s Flickr-based projects.
Musematic asks whether museums might use Flickr to track potential donors’ collecting habits and points us to an article at Evil Mad Science Laboratories on organizing a collection in Flickr.
Random Connections reflects on the Pickens County Library System’s use of Flickr.
Stephen Downes wants to create a Canadian Art photostream on Flickr, but has been stymied by museums’ photography policies on regarding works in the public domain. e-artcasting reflects on a similar issue.
Ruth Graham writes at the New York Sun about museum visitors’ surreptitious snapshots, some of which end up on Flickr.
Museum projects on Flickr
You can find a ton of museum photo groups, some initiated by museums but most not, by doing a search for “museum” in Flickr groups.
East Lothian Museum shares artifacts on Flickr. An example:
Fisher girl’s costume from the East Lothian Museum collection on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.
The Brooklyn Museum has a Flickr page with a lot of public groups.
The Walker Art Center also has a number of photo sets as well as two groups.
Stajichlog alerts us to theMoMAProject[NYC] on Flickr. It’s a group photo pool with more than 17,000 photos.
National Museums Liverpool asked photographers to post photos to Flickr that replicate photos in the museum’s collection of Stewart Bale photographs.
Special mention needs to be made of e-artcasting, which is increasingly becoming a hotspot for discussions of, and projects related to, sociable technologies in museums. Their most recent project is Museums in Libya, in which lamusediffuse has harnessed Flickr users to create a map of museums in Libya, complete with photos. Other e-artcasting projects include the e-artcasting Flickr page, the e-artcasting Listible page, the e-artcasting wiki, and the e-artcasting del.icio.us page.
On to part IV. . . YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn.