Home / progress report

Our Data Lifeboat workshops are complete

Thanks to support from the Mellon Foundation, we have now completed our two international Data Lifeboat workshops. They were great! We have various blog posts planned to share what happened, and I’ll just start with a very quick summary.

As you may know, we had laid out doing two workshops:

  1. Washington DC, at The Library of Congress, in October, and
  2. London, at the Garden Museum and Autograph Gallery, in November.

We were pleased to welcome a total of 32 people across the events, from libraries, archives, academic institutions, the freelance world, other like-minded nonprofits, Flickr.com, and Flickr.org.

Now we are doing the work of sifting through the bazillion post-its and absorbing the great conversations had as we worked through Tori’s fantastic program for the event. We were all very well-fed and organized too, thanks to Ewa’s superb project management. Thank you both.

Workshop aims

The aims of each workshop were the same:

  • Articulate the value of archiving social media, and Data Lifeboat
  • Detail where Data Lifeboat fits in current ecology of tools and practices
  • Detail where Data Lifeboat fits with curatorial approaches and content delivery
  • Plot (and recognise) the type and amount of work it would take to establish Data Lifeboat or similar in organisations

Workshop outline

We met these aims by lining up the workshops into different sessions:

  1. Foundations of Long-Term Digital Preservation – Backward/forward horizons; understanding digital infrastructures; work happening in long-term digital preservation
  2. Data Lifeboat: What we’re thinking so far – Reporting on our NEH work to prototype software and policy, including a live demo; positioning a Data Lifeboat in emergency/not-emergency scenarios; curation needs or desires to use Data Lifeboats as selection/acquisition tool
  3. Consent and Care in Social Media Archiving – Ethics of care in digital archives; social context and care vs extractive data practices; mapping ethical rights, risks, responsibilities including copyright and data protection, and consent, and
  4. Characteristics of a Robust & Responsible Safe Harbor Network (our planned extension of the Data Lifeboat concept – think LOCKSS-ish) – The long history of safe harbor networks; logistics of such a network; Trust.

I’m not going to report on these now, but whet your appetite for our further reporting back.

Background readings

Tori also prepared some grounding readings for the event, which we thought others may like to review:

Needless to say, we all enjoyed it very much, and heard the same from our attendees. Several follow-on chats have been arranged, and the community continues to wiggle towards each other.

Progress Update on the Flickr Commons Revitalization

First new members in years, November 2024

Last week we passed a big milestone set out in the Strategy 2021-2023 – Flickr Commons Revitalization I wrote in 2021. As the strategy says, when the Commons launched in 2008, the program had two main objectives:

  1. To increase public access to archival photography collections, and
  2. To provide a way for the general public to contribute information and knowledge.

Our current work to reinvigorate the program introduces two new ones: 

  1. To propagate updates from and to member catalogs and other sources, and
  2. To protect and attend to the long life of this unique collection.

Even though it’s now 2024, we are still on the track we set out back in 2021. After doing research with Commons members to inform the strategy, we heard five main requests:

  1. Add new Discovery layer and encourage contribution – We launched commons.flickr.org earlier in the year, and have continued to develop it with recent activity, an overview of conversations about the pictures, and a simple map. Alex made a changelog too, so you can see how it evolves.
  2. Co-design granular, comparative, exportable stats – The company launched an enhancement to the core stats feature on Flickr.com November last year, which got most of the way to helping Flickr Commons members report to their people on how people are interacting with their accounts. Being able to justify your time to work on Flickr.com and community engagement inside museums, libraries, and archives is supported by this directly.
  3. Improve description tools for regular researchers – We haven’t started on this in earnest yet, and hope to in 2025. (Would you like to be in our user group for this? Please get in touch.)
  4. Incorporate CC0 and Public Domain Mark (PDM) – This is not done yet, but we have been advocating for the upgrade of CC 2.0 to CC 4.0 which is now a work in progress. We have also created a Collections Development Policy and other supporting content to help guide new members on what ‘no known copyright restrictions’ means and how to use it.
  5. Streamline onboarding to easily manage members and participation – We are excited to be working with the company on developing new Commons-specific APIs to allow our team to build out new administration tools for the program. This will continue in 2025, and make everything much easier!

New members!

For the first time in several years, we’ve welcomed three new Commons members to the fold:

And we have a tranche of new members in the wings, ready to go, including our first member from India!

Seventeen years!

Flickr Commons was launched in 2008, so will be turning 17 in January. It was lovely for some of our team to visit with Michelle, Helena, Phil, and others in The Library of Congress Commons team last week. We were there for a Data Lifeboat workshop, and it was great to dream about what the next sixteen years could be like together! (We’ll be writing the workshops up separately.)

So, keep an eye out for more new members coming aboard, and if you work inside a cultural organization with a photography collection, get in touch to see if joining Flickr Commons could help your organization grow a new audience. (Short answer: it can!)