And we’re off! Thanks to the Digital Humanities Advancement Grant we were awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, our work on the Data Lifeboat has started, in our Content Mobility program. We’ll be posting an update for you each month. 

Excellent Lifeboat-related game and book brought in by Alex for our Kick-off

What’s a Data Lifeboat?

A quick recap for those not familiar with the concept, from our grant narrative:

“A Data Lifeboat is an archival piece of Flickr, not all of the 50 billion images and their metadata. For example, a Lifeboat might contain all the photos tagged with “sunflower” or all the Recipes to Share group submissions. Whatever facet of the data you can think of, you could generate a Data Lifeboat for it. We envision an archival sliver richer than a mere folder of JPGs: one where you can navigate the content to explore and understand its networked context. Even better, an archival sliver that is updated if things change at flickr.com. Our goals with this project are to create several rough prototypes of the software, develop a reasonably detailed understanding of the main technical challenges, prepare a survey of critical ongoing legal issues, and establish a robust design direction for further product development.”

This idea was born from two challenges: 1) Flickr contains a multitude of shared histories, and is owned and controlled by a corporation which could decide to close the service, which—as we’ve seen in the past—can result in the destruction of cultural heritage, and 2) the Flickr archive is huge and, in its current form, impossible for any one archival institution to take on.

Flickr’s 50 billion or so photos reflect our diverse heritage, traditions, and history back to us in a unique way. The collection is also born digital, a massive advantage over conventional archives, because the photographers usually describe their pictures themselves as they publish. The pictures are also enriched by the network of social activity that surrounds them, which – again – is unique to the Flickrverse. Finally, this kind of volume is astonishing: Flickr and other platforms like it are orders of magnitude larger than our biggest cultural collections to date.

At the Foundation, we believe we must begin to treat this collection as we would our ‘traditional’ great libraries, archives, and collections. Time is of the essence: the commercial platforms that host these kinds of huge collections can (and do) disappear, effectively sinking our heritage along with them. Our hope is that a Data Lifeboat will carry Flickr images away from the possibility of a sinking ship unscathed. Our future plans include developing the idea of a “dock” in a “safe harbour” – somewhere specific for the Data Lifeboat to land and be preserved.

The scope of the grant

We’re using the NEH grant to create two identical prototype Data Lifeboats containing a selection of the Flickr Commons. This will (hopefully) be a richer archival format that allows for the exploration of content within its networked context, and one that can be updated when changes are introduced in Flickr.com. Importantly, we want to place these two Lifeboats in two different places, a proxy for our developing goal of “safe harbours” for them.

This phase of the project, making a demonstrable prototype, or prototypes, is scheduled to end mid-year.

Our crew

It’s an exciting and completely new thing, and working on it is a multidisciplinary team drawn from both the Flickr Foundation and our Flickr Commons members and advisors:

• George Oates, Project Director, who provides strategic and design input, and financial oversight
• Alex Chan, Tech Lead, who is developing the core of our prototypes
• Jessamyn West, Community Manager, who leads our communication with the Flickr Commons collaborators, the project advisors, as well as broader audiences
• Ewa Spohn, Project Manager, who ensures the team sticks to the plan. And budget

We’re excited to engage some of our Flickr Commons members directly for the first time, too. The Flickr Foundation team will be joined by staff from three of our member institutions:

• Dr Mia Ridge, Digital Curator at the British Library
• Alan Renga, Digital Archivist at the San Diego Air & Space Museum
• Mary Grace Kosta, Congregational Archivist at the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph in Canada

And finally, our advisors, who bring a wide range of experience and knowledge and will help us make sure we build stuff for the long term:

• Trevor Owens, Director of Digital Services, Library of Congress
• Neil Jefferies, Head of Innovation at the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford
• Ilya Kremer, Lead Developer at Webrecorder
• Jed Sundwall, Executive Director at Radiant Earth
• Dietrich Ayala, Advisor at the Filecoin Foundation

Kick-off? Done.

We’re about to have our first all-hands meeting, although in late January we took advantage of Dietrich’s short visit to London to hold our first face-to-face workshop. 

Jenn, Ewa, George, Alex, Stef, and Dietrich (the photographer) at our kick-off at HQ

Over coffee and sugary snacks, we spent two days exploring decentralized storage and how it could be applied to archiving digital content, and thinking through a possible schema for the data in a data lifeboat. 

Emerging questions

Many, many (#many) questions arose (for which we currently have no answers), for example:

• Is a Data Lifeboat launched in response to an emergency or as part of regular housekeeping?
• What must a Data Lifeboat contain? Could it initially just be a manifest and the images (which are large and expensive to process) are added later?
• Who decides what is in (and out) of a Data Lifeboat and to what extent should it feel like an active selection?
• Where are the ‘edges’ of the network surrounding a Flickr photo, and what is a holistic archive?
• What existing digital asset management formats could (should) a Data Lifeboat be consistent with for it to be ‘docked’ successfully?

We were also very pleasantly surprised by the power of our lifeboat metaphor and how far we could stretch it to help coordinate our thinking! And thanks again to Dietrich for sharing time with us to crack the project open.

Next steps

Next up is our first all-hands meeting to bring the whole project team up to speed with the plan. That’ll be followed by a deep dive review of digital asset management systems in cultural institutions and a survey of the legal rocks that a Data Lifeboat may encounter. We think that will give us enough to allow us to define some high level requirements for the prototypes so that the development proper can start towards the end of the month.

Somewhere among all that we’re also planning a team expedition to a lifeboat museum to learn more about how lifeboats work in the physical world, but more about that in another blog post…

This work is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Since January 2008, the Flickr Commons has been a place for cultural heritage organizations to share their unique historical photography collections with a global community of people interested in visual culture, and see how Flickr volunteer researchers can add knowledge and new descriptions to them.

Flickr Commons has grown to include over 100 members in 24 countries, amassing roughly 1.5 million pictures on flickr.com over the past 16 years. And from today you can now delve into all of the organizations who’ve contributed to this vast historical resource in our new, dedicated Flickr Commons Explorer! Not only can you see which organizations take part in the Commons, but also the scale and scope of their collections. Have a look around and let us know how it can be more useful to you!

We’re celebrating in other ways too:

🎈For one day only, we’re taking over Flickr’s Explore page with photos from the Commons (with thanks to Josie and Crystal in the .com team)

🖼️ We’re featuring the stories of sixteen less well-known gems from the Flickr Commons collection

And no birthday is complete without looking back at the year that’s passed and the year ahead.

U.S. Marine wife Marge Brown blowing out the candles on her birthday cake, from State Archives of North Carolina.

2023: Spotlight on Flickr Commons

We’ve been working hard to breathe new life into the Flickr Commons program after a quiet period.

• We welcomed Jessamyn West to the Flickr Foundation to look after the Flickr Commons as our Community Manager.
• Alex Chan joined us as our Tech Lead. They’re building all the new tools to help Flickr Commons partners see inside their Commons collections and measure their impact.
• We opened a ‘new front door’ for Flickr Commons, a way of exploring all of the Commons members in one place – have a look around!

(This is a screenshot showing you our four newest members, from the Flickr Commons Explorer.)

2024: Growing the Commons community

This year we’re continuing to reconnect with existing Commons members as well as opening the doors to new ones. We’re chuffed to share that we have our first new members coming online very soon: Community Archives of Belleville and Hastings County (Ontario, Canada); State Archives of North Carolina (USA); and Port Morien Digital Archive (Nova Scotia, Canada).

You can meet our three newest members on the blog, and, if you’re a cultural institution with a photography collection, do consider joining in. We’d love to hear from you, and we’ve written about how Flickr Commons works and what it means to join.

Generally, we are working to make it easier for cultural organizations to use flickr.com to easily reach a global audience of millions, especially smaller institutions. We’re planning to build tools that support joining the Flickr Commons. That includes resources and workflows for onboarding, member management, and engaging the community of volunteer researchers who use, comment and tag Commons photos. Expect these to be rolled out throughout this birthday year and beyond!

Data Lifeboat begins

We’re also starting a major project this year, called Data Lifeboat, and we’ve enlisted three staff from our Commons member institutions to help with user research: Dr Mia Ridge (Digital Curator, British Library), Alan Renga (Digital Archivist, San Diego Air & Space Museum), and Mary Grace Kosta (Congregational Archivist, Sisters of St. Joseph in Canada). Trevor Owens, who heads up Digital Preservation at Library of Congress, is also on the advisory board so that’s a nice virtuous circle right there since LC was the first Flickr Commons partner back in 2008.

We’re hiring!

We’re excited to announce that hiring our first-ever Archivist: https://boards.greenhouse.io/flickrorg/jobs/5614267

It’s a fundamental role at the Flickr Foundation, designed to help us archive ourselves for future team members, and, of course, help think through the challenge of keeping Flickr visible for 100 years.

If you or someone you know has experience in digital archives and/or visual archives, has a creative streak and a desire to work for a young technologically-oriented nonprofit, we’d love you to apply.

Celebrate with us!

Follow us on your social media platform of choice for more birthday festivities:

• Twitter
• Mastodon
• Bluesky

One of our goals when we started revitalizing Flickr Commons was to bring in new members. We’re so excited for you to meet them. We’re starting small but mighty.

Bringing in new people gives us a chance to spiff up our existing procedures and documentation, test out our onboarding documents, and make new friends. It also places even more precious memories and cultural heritage into a space that has long term plans, with no known copyright restrictions.

Best of all, all of these folks are existing Flickr users so we can share some of what’s special about them with you before our official “relaunch.”

Without further ado, here is our new cohort. Welcome!

Community Archives of Belleville and Hastings County

Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/cabhc/

Website: https://www.cabhc.ca/

These community archives, located in Belleville Ontario are comprised of “textual records, photographs, maps, newspapers, and other materials that provide information about the people, places and development of Belleville and Hastings County, Ontario.”

This covers the community of about 55,000 people, possibly nicknamed Bellevegas if Wikipedia is to be believed, on the Eastern end of Lake Ontario.

They’ve been posting content to their blog since 2015 including a story of archival survival, a low-tech crowdsourced assessment rolls project, and a tale of reassembling a scrapbook’s pages based on archival material held in three separate archives.

State Archives of North Carolina

Flickr: https://flickr.com/photos/north-carolina-state-archives/
Website: https://archives.ncdcr.gov

The North Carolina State Archives are located in Raleigh, North Carolina. They use their Flickr account to highlight some of the unique and interesting items in their collection. They also interact with the Flickr Community to try to get better information for their unidentified and poorly identified photographs.

Viewing their pictures gives you a great look at both the rural and urban parts of the state. One of my favorite albums is the Carolina Power and Light Photograph Collection, holding images from the photographic library of Carolina Power and Light. The pictures cover 1900 through 1975 give glimpses into random slices of North Carolina.

I have a personal soft spot for the Sidney E. Rochelle Photograph Collection a much smaller collection showing motorcycles in and around Durham in the early 1900s. This is where I found the single photograph of Della Crewe on her Harley Davidson motorcycle, with a sign saying “Around the World on a Harley-Davidson.” Intriguing! That image, thanks to its open license, now illustrates her Wikipedia page.

The Archives have had a blog since 2007, starting from when the State Library and Archives Building was undergoing renovations. They now have several more. There are a lot of fun stories in there though I am always partial to the odd ones.

Port Morien Digital Archive

Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/portmorienarchive/

Port Morien, formerly called Cow Bay, is an historic village located on the rugged east coast of Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, Canada. It is now primarily a fishing village, but it is steeped in coal mining history. It is the location of the first commercial coal mine in North America in 1720, as well as the site of the first Boy Scout troop in North America in 1908.

Local history has been well preserved in the community over the years. Historic plaques have been installed, seniors have been interviewed, and there have been a number of audio visual presentations about the community. In addition, numerous books have been written about various aspects of Port Morien history.

Keeping with the rich tradition in preserving heritage, a small group of community volunteers have collected approximately 2900 photos of our community of Port Morien. It started as a project that was developed in conjunction with the community homecoming in 2015 called Morien Memories. Photos and short videos include people and places from the past as well as the present. Our mission is to provide a digital visual record of our community for future generations to enjoy.

We’ve also got stories about Irish folktales, UFO Desks, epic kayaking, caravaning over Christmas, Washington DC oddities and history, decorated war pigeons, community-based photo id-ing, meeting some photographers, prisoners-turned-artists, tattooing in the 1930s, turkish street photography, books in motion, a cool bell, surprise celebrities, and, of course, cat pictures.

All part of Flickr Commons’ sixteenth birthday.