Jessamyn emailed with Michael Rhode, the Archivist at U. S. Navy Medicine who manages the organization’s Flickr account on Flickr Commons to talk about how they’ve been using Flickr to find new audiences and post historical and current images.

Navy Medicine has been a Flickr Commons member since 2011. What made you interested in becoming a member?

I had previously been the archivist of the National Museum of Health and Medicine, and started posting photos for its Otis Historical Archives. The staff were asked to post their favorite photograph that they found when cataloguing and scanning images that week. BoingBoing mentioned the site, and our hits blew up. So, when I joined Navy Medicine, I looked at reinvigorating their Flickr account. The thought of unlimited storage to share US Navy medical images at no cost with a wide audience was perfect. In the past, the annual fees had always been difficult to get approved.

We’re looking at opening The Commons to new members in 2024. What information, tools, and processes did you need when you began? Have they changed over time?

I find the Commons to be pretty intuitive, but that’s possibly because I personally have been a long-time Flickr user. I think most public-facing collections will understand the advantages offered. I do not have any special processes beyond tracking the images in a spreadsheet. I also have a spreadsheet capturing our daily viewership numbers.

How do you determine what you want to upload? Has this changed over time?

Originally, the account was set up by our public affairs department and was used to highlight events in Navy Medicine, often at the headquarters level. It was an opportunity to highlight Navy Medicine Sailors and the work they do in support of the military’s missions…

When the historian’s department was merged into the overarching Communications division, I asked if I could start using the account. I was posting historical images for years, including a ‘this day in Navy medicine’ photograph.

COVID-19 changed all that. I began working from home and wasn’t scanning historical images at work anymore. I pivoted to trying to capture covid images from Navy medicine around the globe. From finding that material, it was a simple thing to then begin posting any images that Navy Medicine released across what we refer to as ‘the enterprise.’ After Covid waned, I still had subscriptions to all the feeds from various locations and units, so I’ve continued posting more current items than historical ones, especially when I was physically co-located with my colleagues a year ago.

What challenges did you face?

A major challenge was, and is, finding interesting material. A lot of photographs taken these days are promotion or retirement ceremonies and may have a more limited viewership than a war-time picture of a Hospital Corpsman patching up a wounded Marine on an island in the Pacific. The images still have a purpose, but are less likely to break through to a broader public.

What kinds of positive results have you had? (And, any negative ones?)

We haven’t had any negative results that I’ve seen. Positively, a lot of people are seeing various aspects of Navy Medicine, and what some of their taxes pay for. It’s especially useful to sharing to a different community than the one that is reached by the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service (DVIDS) which is where I collect a lot of images from. They’re usually only reaching people in the service or reporters.

Our Flickr site reaches anyone interested in Navy Medicine and its history.

Do you have any particular photo that has a story behind it, either in the photo itself, how it was used, what sort of community reaction you got, or something else?

Particular photo? That’s a tough one. This is our most-viewed image…

…and I have no idea why it is. It’s a pretty basic shot with almost no information, but has over 10,000 views ahead of the next most popular one.

Here’s one – the standard photograph of the World War II raising a flag on Iwo Jima is well known and the basis for a statue near Arlington Cemetery. But other images were taken, and this is one of them…

…and a Navy Hospital Corpsman was at the event.

Or you could look at this image…

…the site of the present day Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, with the National Institutes of Health across the street, and marvel at how empty it was in 1941.

Or on a personal level, see our predecessors in the history office 80 years ago here…

Especially for the historical photographs, there are so many stories behind them!

I was wondering if you had any thoughts to how the “no known copyright restrictions” license works (or doesn’t work) for the sort of content you’re sharing.

From our point of view, these are US Government work products and as such, are in the public domain. Copyright isn’t a consideration for them.

I notice you tend to curate your collections into albums often (we just did a blog post about albums and galleries so this is fresh in my mind). What goes into your process for doing this? Do you only do it when you upload or do you sometimes go back and arrange images for other purposes?

Photos go into albums when being uploaded, although new albums are created on an as-needed basis. As a military organization, we’re fairly structured compared to other institutions, so it’s easy to put material into categories such as Corps (Medical, Dental, Nurse etc) or Facility (hospitals, bases, etc), or Ships (hospital ships, ships staffed with medical personnel, ships visited by medical personnel). Then I can refer the person who needs historical images of Naval Hospital Bremerton to one place for their research.

I rarely go back and re-arrange images into new albums partly because with 23,000 images, it’s a lot of work. So we have three Nurse Corps albums now, and two were created before I took over managing the collection, but I just add new photographs to all three. Someday I’ll combine them all into one, but it’s not high on my list. I do enjoy seeing when someone favors an image or adds it into a new album or gallery though. I check the little alarm icon every day, and am frequently surprised. A 1948 shot of a Nurse bowling gets galleried a lot (although I think she might be playing duckpins).

• See more of Navy Medicine’s Collection on Flickr Commons.

You can also check out this Just the Cakes gallery we made from their account. The Navy loves cake.

Look at one Flickr Commons item and you can see its connections to other items, within the Commons and beyond. The two main organizing methods are Albums and Galleries.

• Albums and Collections (sets of albums) – a member curating and organizing their own photos
• Galleries – a member curating photos from others’ collections

Admirable Albums

Here’s an example photo, a favorite from the Library of Congress.

Going to that photo’s web page shows where else it appears.

It’s in one album from the LOC called Not An Ostrich and thirty-seven different galleries including “People with books,” “badass women,” and “Taking on the World” all of which are fun to explore.

Unlike physical photo albums, digital images can be in more than one album at once so this astronaut photo from NASA is in an album called Astronauts and also one called The Gemini Program.

Some other fun albums from Commons Members include:

• “In memory of the Amundsen-Ellsworth polar flight 1925” from the Preus Museum – an album of an album
• Vesna’s 10 favourite photos – the State Library of Queensland showcases a set curated by one of their followers
• Fairground scenes – glass slides of fairground scenes from the Discovery Museum, Newcastle upon Tyne
• DOCUMERICA – Charles O’Rear – Amtrak – Amtrak’s intercity rail service and life in rural Nebraska from the US National Archives

Learn more about creating or managing Albums on Flickr.

Grand Galleries

A Gallery is a way for Flickr users to curate images in other members’ collections.

This image of a girl dressed like a butterfly from The Field Museum Library is in their Album, called Flower Children, but also six Galleries including Girl Child, storytellers, and one only called “4.”

Searching the Commons for “fun” reveals this photo of Carla Wallenda from Florida Memory which is in thirty-nine Galleries including

• Vintage Circus Performers (Public Domain) – fourteen photos of old-time carnival actors
• Ko-Lor – bright and shiny
• Silly & Fun – people and their antics

Other Flickr users make their own Galleries specifically with Flickr Commons content.

• Oddities from the Commons
• Using Cameras Through Time
• Not all our foremothers wore taffeta and lace

Flickr user wakethesun has created a massive set of Galleries many of which are entirely Flickr Commons content.

Poke around and you’re sure to find something you enjoy!

Learn more about creating, adding or sharing Galleries on Flickr.

Over a recent cup of coffee, George Oates, the indefatigable founder of Flickr Commons and now Executive Director of the Flickr Foundation, asked me if any memorable moments stood out during our long relationship with the Commons since British Library first joined nearly a decade ago. Of course a multitude of inspired engagements instantly filled my mind like some exploding word cloud and I could’ve easily prattled on until our cups dried up and the shop shutters went down. But one emerges from all the rest for me as the most shining example of all and that is what we’ve come to call “The tale of Chico vs the Machine”.

British Library digitised image from page 57 of “A Strange Elopement. … Illustrations by W. H. Overend” | Flickr

Our Flickr Commons story began in 2013 when we were looking for inventive ways to improve the discoverability of a new and exceedingly eclectic collection of 19th century illustrations we’d recently collated. Plucked from the pages of our digitised books by an algorithm built by Ben O’Steen in British Library Labs, this unique and sizable image collection was largely untagged and undescribed. Each image had associated with it only the title of the book and page it came from, but no other details to describe it, such as what the image itself depicted. We needed a curious, smart, engaged, and global audience to set their eyes and collective expertise on it, to help us tag and describe them so we could create meaningful subcollections and improve searchability. We also needed a powerful API to enable working with such a large collection, and the millions of interactions it may potentially garner, at scale. We happily found both in the Flickr Commons. 

In late 2014, we had been chatting with artist Mario Klingemann aka Quasimondo who had happened upon this wild, wonderful and wholly uncurated collection of ours in Flickr Commons and was keen to create a series of artworks using the images. As part of his craft he was mixing automatic image classification with manual confirmation to identify and tag tens of thousands of the images – ranging from maps to ships, portraits to stones – to discover more from within the collection, and in turn, make them more discoverable for others.

16 x 16 Colourful Faces from the British Library Collectio… | Flickr
By Mario Klingemann

The result of data mining the British Library Commons Collection, identifying colorful plates using some image analysis and subsequently using face detection to extract the faces contained therein.

As we were running some statistics around the algorithmically generated tags Mario was creating and adding back to individual images for us via the Flickr API (something in the region of 30,000 at that point if I recall), we noticed that yet another user had already contributed something in the region of 45,000 tags to the collections. Assuming this user was similarly a dabhand with an image classification algorithm, we were absolutely gobsmacked to discover that, at closer inspection, no, actually, these contributions were all added by hand! Not only were these invaluable image tags being manually contributed by one person, but they were expertly and thoughtfully individually crafted. They did not simply identify general objects or themes in each image like “ship”, which in itself was of incalculable value for improving search, particularly when no such simple descriptions existed at all. These tags were of a rare and profound quality. To illustrate, for 19th century biblical images, the user, only known to us by his handle, had added specific biblical passage numbers for which the scene depicted referred to!

British Library digitised image from page 394 of “The eventful voyage of H.M. Discovery Ship ‘Resolute’ to the Arctic Regions in search of Sir J. Franklin. … To which is added an account of her being fallen in with by an American Whaler after her abandonment … and of her presentation to Queen Victoria by the Government of the United States” | Flickr

The sheer scale, quality and value of this singular Flickr user’s personal contribution was so staggering, we immediately sought them out to personally thank them and to ask if we could recognise their work publicly through our BL Labs Award programme, at the very least. And yet, more surprises were to come. When we approached them with our gratitude and our offer of recognition we were very politely rebuffed! They shared with us that as they had been bedbound, it was they who wanted to express their gratitude for the opportunity to remain active in the world in some meaningful way. They told us that days spent trawling through and tagging such a wild and unruly collection, in the knowledge that they’re helping others to find these same gems, was reward enough and I can tell you, it was a response that no one in our team will ever forget. We attempted a few more times to shower them with accolades in some agreeable way but every time our overtures were politely declined on the same grounds.

This memory makes my heart swell and it’s a tale that so perfectly encapsulates the variety of valuable interactions –from the very intimate and human, to the technologically innovative and computationally driven – that the Flickr Commons community and platform has supported.

To give just one example, since 2015, 50,000 maps have been found and tagged by humans, and machines working alongside each other individually or as part of community events. They’ve all been georeferenced and are now being added back into the British Library catalogue as individual collection items in their own right – bringing direct benefits to current and future users of our historical image collections as more wonderful images are surfaced.

Explore the georeferencer or the British Library’s Flickr Albums.

Every tag contributed, whether expertly crafted by human hand, or machine learned by an algorithm, has helped to make thousands, if not millions of unseen historical images from British Library collections more discoverable and we simply could not have gotten this far in curating this massive and wonderful collection without the Flickr Commons. 

By Nora McGregor, Digital Curator in the Digital Scholarship Department of the British Library

The Flickr Commons has been around since 2008, but hasn’t been looked after too well. There is still lots of activity, but the membership hasn’t grown for a few years, and there are no special tools for members, or for the volunteer researchers who help out by adding information about the photographs shared. We did a bunch of research in 2021 about how to turn things around, and I’m happy to say, bringing Jessamyn in to help is a fantastic power-up.

Essentially, the plan to resurrect the program has two main elements:

1. Stabilise the current membership – support community cohesion and communication, develop  aggregate/activity baseline views, fix out-of-date stuff on flickr.com/commons, reconnect with “sleepy” members, and
2. Grow the membership – we especially want to support small institutions who either cannot afford to pay for expensive collection management software, or don’t have enough staff to build out that kind of digital resource, help show/teach members about licensing, digitization, preservation techniques that we can support, build out partnerships and collaborations around the open web, open licensing, and, importantly, careful sharing (as opposed to batch throwing huge piles of cultural materials across the internet without appropriate care).

In her own words:

Hi I’m Jessamyn, and I’ve been a Flickr member since 2004. I’m the daughter of two serious hobby photographers (mom|dad) both of whom have legacy accounts on Flickr and I’ve put a few photos up there as well. I’ve really benefited, over the last two decades, from having a well-organized archive of at least some of my family’s digital heritage. Here’s my great great grandmother, and here’s my great great grandfather from the other side of the family.

I’m a big free culture fan, having done work for the Internet Archive and Wikipedia helping make more “stuff” available to more people online. I also help run MetaFilter, a large online community. My background is in librarianship and technology, so anything that combines those two things piques my interest and makes me happy. I write an irregular newsletter on the topic. I’ve been a huge fan of Flickr Commons since it launched in 2008, often using its images to illustrate Wikipedia or other digital projects.

When the Flickr Foundation came into view, I really wanted to help get more cultural heritage institutions get the tools they needed and wanted so that they could share their culture in a place geared towards longevity and community. I’m happy to be here.

You think you’re happy to be here, Jessamyn? YES! I’m so excited about it! We were on a zoom last week basically giggling at each other. I can’t wait to get started, so here’s a huge and happy welcome to you!

Oh, and while I have your attention, we’ve also just posted another position: Tech Lead. Please share in your networks, and apply if you’re interested!