Ghosts in the Archives Become Ghosts in the Machines

I’m honored to be joining the Flickr Foundation to imagine  the next 100 years of Flickr, thinking critically about the relationships between datasets, history, and archives in the age of generative AI. 

AI is thick with stories, but we tend to only focus on one of them. The big AI story is that, with enough data and enough computing power, we might someday build a new caretaker for the human race: a so-called “superintelligence.” While this story drives human dreams and fears—and dominates the media sphere and policy imagination—it obscures the more realistic story about AI: what it is, what it means, and how it was built.

The invisible stories of AI are hidden in its training data. They are human: photographs of loved ones, favorite places, things meant to be looked at and shared. Some of them are tragic or traumatic. When we look at the output of a large language model (LLM), or the images made by a diffusion model, we’re seeing a reanimation of thousands of points of visual data — data that was generated by people like you and me, posting experiences and art to other people over the World Wide Web. It’s the story of our heritage, archives and the vast body of human visual culture. 

I approach generated images as a kind of seance, a reanimation of these archives and data points which serve as the techno-social debris of our past. These images are broken down — diffused — into new images by machine learning models. But what ghosts from the past move into the images these models make? What haunts the generated image from within the training data? 

In “Seance of the Digital Image” I began to seek out the “ghosts” that haunt the material that machines use to make new images. In my residency with the Flickr Foundation, I’ll continue to dig into training data — particularly, the Flickr Commons collection — to see the ways it shapes AI-generated images. These will not be one to one correlations, because that’s not how these models work.

So how do these diffusion models work? How do we make an image with AI? The answer to this question is often technical: a system of diffusion, in which training images are broken down into noise and reassembled. But this answer ignores the cultural component of the generated image. Generative AI is a product of training datasets scraped from the web, and entangled in these datasets are vast troves of cultural heritage data and photographic archives. When training data-driven AI tools, we are diffusing data, but we are also diffusing visual culture. 

 

Eryk Salvaggio: Flowers Blooming Backward Into Noise (2023) from ARRG! on Vimeo.

 

In my research, I have developed a methodology for “reading” AI-generated images as the products of these datasets, as a way of interrogating the biases that underwrite them. Since then, I have taken an interest in this way of reading for understanding the lineage, or genealogy, of generated images: what stew do these images make with our archives? Where does it learn the concept of what represents a person, or a tree, or even an archive? Again, we know the technical answer. But what is the cultural answer to this question? 

By looking at generated images and the prompts used to make them, we’ll build a way to map their lineages: the history that shapes and defines key concepts and words for image models. My hope is that this endeavor shows us new ways of looking at generated images, and to surface new stories about what such images mean.

As the tech industry continues building new infrastructures on this training data, our window of opportunity for deciding what we give away to these machines is closing, and understanding what is in those datasets is difficult, if not impossible. Much of the training data is proprietary, or has been taken offline. While we cannot map generated images to their true training data, massive online archives like Flickr give us insight into what they might be. Through my work with the Flickr Foundation, I’ll look at the images from institutions and users to think about what these images mean in this generated era. 

In this sense, I will interrogate what haunts a generated image, but also what haunts the original archives: what stories do we tell, and which do we lose? I hope to reverse the generated image in a meaningful way: to break the resulting image apart, tackling correlations between the datasets that train them, the archives that built those datasets, and the images that emerge from those entanglements.

Thanks to the Digital Humanities Advancement Grant we were awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, our Data Lifeboat project (which is part of the Content Mobility Program) is now well and truly underway. The Data Lifeboat is our response to the challenge of archiving the 50 billion or so images currently on Flickr, should the service go down. It’s simply too big to archive as a whole, and we think that these shared histories should be available for the long term, so we’re exploring a decentralized approach. Find out more about the context for this work in our first blog post.

So, after our kick-off last month, we were left with a long list of open questions. That list became longer thanks to our first all-hands meeting that took place shortly afterwards! It grew again once we had met with the project user group – staff from the British Library, San Diego Air & Space Museum, and Congregation of Sisters of St Joseph – a small group representing the diversity of Flickr Commons members. Rather than being overwhelmed, we were buoyed by the obvious enthusiasm and encouragement across the group, all of whom agreed that this is very much an idea worth pursuing. 

As Mia Ridge from the British Library put it; “we need ephemeral collections to tell the story of now and give people who don’t currently think they have a role in preservation a different way of thinking about it”. And from Mary Grace of the Congregation of Sisters of St. Joseph in Canada, “we [the smaller institutions] don’t want to be the 3rd class passengers who drown first”. 

Software sketching

We’ve begun working on the software approach to create a Data Lifeboat, focussing on the data model and assessing existing protocols we may use to help package it. Alex and George started creating some small prototypes to test how we should include metadata, and have begun exploring what “social metadata” could be like – that’s the kind of metadata that can only be created on Flickr, and is therefore a required element in any Data Lifeboat (as you’ll see from the diagram below, it’s complex). 

Feb 2024: An early sketch of a Data Lifeboat’s metadata graph structure.

Thanks to our first set of tools, Flinumeratr and Flickypedia, we have robust, reusable code for getting photos and metadata from Flickr. We’ve done some experiments with JSON, XML, and METS as possible ways to store the metadata, and started to imagine what a small viewer that would be included in each Data Lifeboat might be like. 

Complexity of long-term licensing

Alongside the technical development we have started developing our understanding of the legal issues that a Data Lifeboat is going to have to navigate to avoid unintended consequences of long-term preservation colliding with licenses set in the present. We discussed how we could build care and informed participation into the infrastructure, and what the pitfalls might be. There are fiddly questions around creating a Data Lifeboat containing photos from other Flickr members. 

• As the image creator, would you need to be notified if one of your images has been added to a Data Lifeboat? 
• Conversely, how would you go about removing an image from a Data Lifeboat? 
• What happens if there’s a copyright dispute regarding images in a Data Lifeboat that is docked somewhere else? 

We discussed which aspects of other legal and licensing models might apply to Data Lifeboats, given the need to maintain stewardship and access over the long term (100 years at least!), as well as the need for the software to remain usable over this kind of time horizon. This isn’t something that the world of software has ready answers for. 

• Could Flickr.org offer this kind of service? 
• How would we notify future users of the conditions of the license, let alone monitor the decay of licenses in existing Data Lifeboats over this kind of timescale? 

So many standards to choose from

We had planned to do a deep dive into the various digital asset management systems used by cultural institutions, but this turned out to be a trickier subject than we thought as there are simply too many approaches, tools, and cobbled-together hacks being used in cultural institutions. Everyone seems to be struggling with this, so it’s not clear (yet) how best to approach this. If you have any ideas, let us know!

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

State Archives of North Carolina – Charlotte Hawkins Brown

Charlotte Hawkins Brown was an educator and civil rights activist who opened the Palmer Institute for Black students in Sedalia North Carolina in 1902.

The Palmer Institute was the only accredited rural high school (for African American or white students) in Guilford County NC. It graduated generations of Black educators; Brown worked there herself until she retired in 1952.

The State Archives also have a set of sixty archival images of North Carolinian women from the 1800s through the 1950s.

Other notable collections include this set of photographs of Black soldiers from North Carolina who fought in World War I and a collection of Raleigh’s lost African American architectural landmarks (as well as some that are still around).

 

San Diego Air and Space Museum Archives – African Americans in Aviation

From the Tuskeegee Airmen to Mae Jemison, the San Diego Air and Space Museum Archives collects photographs and other ephemera, some of it from personal scrapbooks, documenting Black people working in aviation and aerospace.

Benjamin Davis, specifically had a long military career, retiring in 1998 as a four-star general.

Leroy Criss, another of the Tuskegee Airmen, kept a scrapbook where many of these images are from.

Willa Brown was the first Black woman to earn a pilot’s license in the United States.

 

While we’re on the subject of space, NASA also has created a collection of Black astronauts and other people who worked in aerospace.

 

National Library of Medicine – African American Medical Practitioners

The NLM has curated a collection of Black workers, mostly women, in the Public Health Service for their History of Medicine division.

Mennonite Church USA – Camp Ebenezer Photographs, 1947-1950

Tillie Yoder Nauraine founded an early “fresh air” camp in Ohio for poor Black  children from Chicago. This was part of the Mennonite movement towards “building an interracial church in a segregated society.” Yoder opened the camp out of her conviction that “all people are equal in God’s eyes.”

 

Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation Cornell University – Civil Rights

The International Ladies Garment Workers Union actively worked for the rights of Black workers in including picketing Woolworths and making a New York to Washington DC Prayer pilgrimage to mark the anniversary of the Supreme Court decision that segregated schools are unconstitutional.

The Kheel Center also has documentation of the Southern Tenants Farmers Union, an integrated union which held meetings in Parkin Arkansas in 1937.

If you’d like to see more archival photography (or other material) about Black history and culture, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division at New York Public Library owns over 300,000 images, thousands of which are online and over a thousand of which are in the public domain.

Or if you’re interested in modern Black photographers read this GQ article where twenty-five Black photographers discuss what drives their work or this Guardian article showcasing the best photography by Black female photographers or this blog post at Flickr.com spotlighting the work of photographer Ayesha Kazim.

 

State Archives of North Carolina – Charlotte Hawkins Brown

Charlotte Hawkins Brown was an educator and civil rights activist who opened the Palmer Institute for Black students in Sedalia North Carolina in 1902.

The Palmer Institute was the only accredited rural high school (for African American or white students) in Guilford County NC. It graduated generations of Black educators; Brown worked there herself until she retired in 1952.

The State Archives also have a set of sixty archival images of North Carolinian women from the 1800s through the 1950s.

Other notable collections include this set of photographs of Black soldiers from North Carolina who fought in World War I and a collection of Raleigh’s lost African American architectural landmarks (as well as some that are still around).

 

San Diego Air and Space Museum Archives – African Americans in Aviation

From the Tuskeegee Airmen to Mae Jemison, the San Diego Air and Space Museum Archives collects photographs and other ephemera, some of it from personal scrapbooks, documenting Black people working in aviation and aerospace.

Benjamin Davis, specifically had a long military career, retiring in 1998 as a four-star general.

Leroy Criss, another of the Tuskegee Airmen, kept a scrapbook where many of these images are from.

Willa Brown was the first Black woman to earn a pilot’s license in the United States.

 

While we’re on the subject of space, NASA also has created a collection of Black astronauts and other people who worked in aerospace.

 

National Library of Medicine – African American Medical Practitioners

The NLM has curated a collection of Black workers, mostly women, in the Public Health Service for their History of Medicine division.

Mennonite Church USA – Camp Ebenezer Photographs, 1947-1950

Tillie Yoder Nauraine founded an early “fresh air” camp in Ohio for poor Black  children from Chicago. This was part of the Mennonite movement towards “building an interracial church in a segregated society.” Yoder opened the camp out of her conviction that “all people are equal in God’s eyes.”

 

Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation Cornell University – Civil Rights

The International Ladies Garment Workers Union actively worked for the rights of Black workers in including picketing Woolworths and making a New York to Washington DC Prayer pilgrimage to mark the anniversary of the Supreme Court decision that segregated schools are unconstitutional.

The Kheel Center also has documentation of the Southern Tenants Farmers Union, an integrated union which held meetings in Parkin Arkansas in 1937.

If you’d like to see more archival photography (or other material) about Black history and culture, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division at New York Public Library owns over 300,000 images, thousands of which are online and over a thousand of which are in the public domain.

Or if you’re interested in modern Black photographers read this GQ article where twenty-five Black photographers discuss what drives their work or this Guardian article showcasing the best photography by Black female photographers or this blog post at Flickr.com spotlighting the work of photographer Ayesha Kazim.

 

For the past four months, we’ve been working with the Culture & Heritage team at the Wikimedia Foundation — the non-profit that operates Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and other Wikimedia free knowledge projects — to build Flickypedia, a new tool for bridging the gap between photos on Flickr and files on Wikimedia Commons. Wikimedia Commons is a free-to-use library of illustrations, photos, drawings, videos, and music. By contributing their photos to Wikimedia Commons, Flickr photographers help to illustrate Wikipedia, a free, collaborative encyclopedia written in over 300 languages. More than 1.7 billion unique devices visit Wikimedia projects every month.

We demoed the initial version at GLAM Wiki 2023 in Uruguay, and now that we’ve incorporated some useful feedback from the Wikimedia community, we’re ready to launch it. Flickypedia is now available at https://www.flickr.org/tools/flickypedia/, and we’re really pleased with the result. Our goal was to create higher quality records on Wikimedia Commons, with better connected data and descriptive information, and to make it easier for Flickr photographers to see how their photos are being used.

This project has achieved our original goals – and a couple of new ones we discovered along the way.

So what is Flickypedia?

An easy way to copy photos from Flickr to Wikimedia Commons

The original vision of Flickypedia was a new tool for copying photos from Flickr to Wikimedia Commons, a re-envisioning of the popular Flickr2Commons tool, which copied around 5.4M photos.

This new upload tool is what we built first, leveraging ideas from Flinumeratr, a toy we built for exploring Flickr photos. You start by entering a Flickr URL:

And then Flickypedia will find all photos at that URL, and show you the ones which are suitable for copying to Wikimedia Commons. You can choose which photos you want to upload:

Then you enter a title, a short description, and any categories you want to add to the photo(s):

Then you click “Upload”, and the photo(s) are copied to Wikimedia Commons. Once it’s done, you can leave a comment on the original Flickr photo, so the photographer can see the photo in its new home:

As well as the title and caption written by the uploader, we automatically populate a series of machine-readable metadata fields (“Structured Data on Commons” or “SDC”) based on the Flickr information – the original photographer, date taken, a link to the original, and so on. You can see the exact list of fields in our data modeling document. This should make it easier for Commons users to find the photos they need, and maintain the link to the original photo on Flickr.

This flow has a little more friction than some other Flickr uploading tools, which is by design. We want to enable high-quality descriptions and metadata for carefully selected photos; not just bulk copying for the sake of copying. Our goal is to get high quality photos on Wikimedia Commons, with rich metadata which enables them to be discovered and used – and that’s what Flickypedia enables.

Reducing risk and responsible licensing

Flickr photographers can choose from a variety of licenses, and only some of them can be used on Wikimedia Commons: CC0, Public Domain, CC BY and CC BY-SA. If it’s any other license, the photo shouldn’t be on Wikimedia Commons, according to its licensing policy.

As we were building the Flickypedia uploader, we took the opportunity to emphasize the need for responsible licensing – when you select your photographs, it checks the licenses, and doesn’t allow you to copy anything that doesn’t have a Commons-compatible license:

This helps to reduce risk for everyone involved with Flickr and Wikimedia Commons.

Better duplicate detection

When we looked at the feedback on existing Flickr upload tools, there was one bit of overwhelming feedback: people want better duplicate detection. There are already over 11 million Flickr photos on Wikimedia Commons, and if a photo has already been copied, it doesn’t need to be copied again.

Wikimedia Commons already has some duplicate detection. It’ll spot if you upload a byte-for-byte identical file, but it can’t detect duplicates if the photo has been subtly altered – say, converted to a different file format, or a small border cropped out.

It turns out that there’s no easy way to find out if a given Flickr photo is in Wikimedia Commons. Although most Flickr upload tools will embed that metadata somewhere, they’re not consistent about it. We found at least four ways to spot possible duplicates:

• You could look for a Flickr URL in the structured data (the machine-readable metadata)
• You could look for a Flickr URL in the Wikitext (the human-readable description)
• You could look for a Flickr ID in the filename
• Or Flickypedia could know that it had already uploaded the photo

And even looking for matching Flickr URLs can be difficult, because there are so many forms of Flickr URLs – here are just some of the varieties of Flickr URLs we found in the existing Wikimedia Commons data:

• https://www.flickr.com/photos/kclama/345939222/
• http://photos21.flickr.com/35809048_55e1b88e2a_o.jpg
• https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4586/37767087695_bb4ecff5f4_o.jpg
• https://flic.kr/ps/3b5o5E
• https://flickr.com/photos/44124385773@N01/7003937/

(And this is without some of the smaller variations, like trailing slashes and http/https.)

We’d already built a Flickr URL parser as part of Flinumeratr, so we were able to write code to recognise these URLs – but it’s a fairly complex component, and that only benefits Flickypedia. We wanted to make it easier for everyone.

So we did!

We proposed (and got accepted) a new Flickr Photo ID property. This is a new field in the machine-readable structured data, which can contain the numeric ID. This is a clean, unambiguous pointer to the original photo, and dramatically simplifies the process of looking for existing Flickr photos.

When Flickypedia uploads a new photo to Flickr, it adds this new property. This should make it easier for other tools to find Flickr photos uploaded with Flickypedia, and skip re-uploading them.

Backfillr Bot: Making Flickr metadata better for all Flickr photos on Commons

That’s great for new photos uploaded with Flickypedia – but what about photos uploaded with other tools, tools that don’t use this field? What about the 10M+ Flickr photos already on Wikimedia Commons? How do we find them?

To fix this problem, we created a new Wikimedia Commons bot: Flickypedia Backfillr Bot. It goes back and fills in structured data on Flickr photos on Commons, including the Flickr Photo ID property. It uses our URL parser to identify all the different forms of Flickr URLs.

This bot is still in a preliminary stage—waiting for approval from the Wikimedia Commons community—but once granted, we’ll be able to improve the metadata for every Flickr photo on Wikimedia Commons. And in addition, create a hook that other tools can use – either to fill in more metadata, or search for Flickr photos.

Sydney Harbour Bridge, from the Museums of History New South Wales. No known copyright restrictions.

Flickypedia started as a tool for copying photos from Flickr to Wikimedia Commons. From the very start, we had ideas about creating stronger links between the two – the “say thanks” feature, where uploaders could leave a comment for the original Flickr photographer – but that was only for new photos.

Along the way, we realized we could build a proper two-way bridge, and strengthen the connection between all Flickr photos on Wikimedia Commons, not just those uploaded with Flickypedia.

We think this ability to follow a photo around the web is really important – to see where it’s come from, and to see where it’s going. A Flickr photo isn’t just an image, it comes with a social context and history, and being uploaded to Wikimedia Commons is the next step in its journey. You can’t separate an image from its context.

As we start to focus on Data Lifeboat, we’ll spend even more time looking at how to preserve the history of a photo – and Flickypedia has given us plenty to think about.

If you want to use Flickypedia to upload some photos to Wikimedia Commons, visit www.flickr.org/tools/flickypedia.

If you want to look at the source code, go to github.com/Flickr-Foundation/flickypedia.

Thanks to the Digital Humanities Advancement Grant we were awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, our Data Lifeboat project (which is part of the Content Mobility Program) is now well and truly underway. The Data Lifeboat is our response to the challenge of archiving the 50 billion or so images currently on Flickr, should the service go down. It’s simply too big to archive as a whole, and we think that these shared histories should be available for the long term, so we’re exploring a decentralized approach. Find out more about the context for this work in our first blog post.

So, after our kick-off last month, we were left with a long list of open questions. That list became longer thanks to our first all-hands meeting that took place shortly afterwards! It grew again once we had met with the project user group – staff from the British Library, San Diego Air & Space Museum, and Congregation of Sisters of St Joseph – a small group representing the diversity of Flickr Commons members. Rather than being overwhelmed, we were buoyed by the obvious enthusiasm and encouragement across the group, all of whom agreed that this is very much an idea worth pursuing. 

As Mia Ridge from the British Library put it; “we need ephemeral collections to tell the story of now and give people who don’t currently think they have a role in preservation a different way of thinking about it”. And from Mary Grace of the Congregation of Sisters of St. Joseph in Canada, “we [the smaller institutions] don’t want to be the 3rd class passengers who drown first”. 

Software sketching

We’ve begun working on the software approach to create a Data Lifeboat, focussing on the data model and assessing existing protocols we may use to help package it. Alex and George started creating some small prototypes to test how we should include metadata, and have begun exploring what “social metadata” could be like – that’s the kind of metadata that can only be created on Flickr, and is therefore a required element in any Data Lifeboat (as you’ll see from the diagram below, it’s complex). 

Feb 2024: An early sketch of a Data Lifeboat’s metadata graph structure.

Thanks to our first set of tools, Flinumeratr and Flickypedia, we have robust, reusable code for getting photos and metadata from Flickr. We’ve done some experiments with JSON, XML, and METS as possible ways to store the metadata, and started to imagine what a small viewer that would be included in each Data Lifeboat might be like. 

Complexity of long-term licensing

Alongside the technical development we have started developing our understanding of the legal issues that a Data Lifeboat is going to have to navigate to avoid unintended consequences of long-term preservation colliding with licenses set in the present. We discussed how we could build care and informed participation into the infrastructure, and what the pitfalls might be. There are fiddly questions around creating a Data Lifeboat containing photos from other Flickr members. 

• As the image creator, would you need to be notified if one of your images has been added to a Data Lifeboat? 
• Conversely, how would you go about removing an image from a Data Lifeboat? 
• What happens if there’s a copyright dispute regarding images in a Data Lifeboat that is docked somewhere else? 

We discussed which aspects of other legal and licensing models might apply to Data Lifeboats, given the need to maintain stewardship and access over the long term (100 years at least!), as well as the need for the software to remain usable over this kind of time horizon. This isn’t something that the world of software has ready answers for. 

• Could Flickr.org offer this kind of service? 
• How would we notify future users of the conditions of the license, let alone monitor the decay of licenses in existing Data Lifeboats over this kind of timescale? 

So many standards to choose from

We had planned to do a deep dive into the various digital asset management systems used by cultural institutions, but this turned out to be a trickier subject than we thought as there are simply too many approaches, tools, and cobbled-together hacks being used in cultural institutions. Everyone seems to be struggling with this, so it’s not clear (yet) how best to approach this. If you have any ideas, let us know!

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.