Friday, November 19, 2010

Thing #4: Flickr

So, rather belatedly, we come Thing #4, which is Flickr. I meant to write this blog some weeks ago, as I already have 2 accounts on Flickr so only need to report on them, but the combination of work pressures and a holiday (Mexico City, since you ask, and very nice it was too) meant that my report has been delayed until now. Luckily for me, Thing #5 has also been somewhat delayed so I'm not behind. Hurrah!

The first account I opened with Flickr is a personal account which I created in 2007, chiefly to share pictures of my cat, since that's what the internet was invented for. We'd been given a digital camera not long before this and so I started uploading photos regularly. I also returned to my old packets of photos and scanned uploaded old photos of holidays to Berlin. During this time I attended a seminar run by the charismatic Seb Chan of the Powerhouse Museum, who have managed to punch above their weight as a local design museum with strategic use of social media, such as Flickr. This seminar alerted me to possibilities on Flickr beyond just simply posting up photos, such as geo-tgging, which I have since tried to do with all my photographs where possible. Just as I started being quite active on Flickr, including joining groups and commenting on other people's photographs, I reached the upload limit allowed before you have to start paying. At that point I had to consider whether I was going to use it enough to make paying the (admittedly small) annual fee worthwhile, and so far, I haven't done so, and have tended to upload photographs to Facebook instead for sharing with friends, rather than generally online. My experience was that in order to get the most out of Flickr, as with all social media sites, you had to put quite a lot of time and effort in to creating relationships with other people first and this wasn't something I particularly wanted to do with my own photos. I may however reconsider this at a later date.

The second account I manage is the recently created University Archives stream. This was created as part of a social media campaign to try to track down willing victims for the University's oral history project in time for the 175th anniversary. The first photos we posted were class photos which, in the opposite to usual, had the names of all the students but not which class they were. We hope that by posting all the names they might be picked up by online searches and eventually lead us to at least some of the people in the photographs. These photos were also posted on Friends Reunited for the same reason.We then added to these with some 19th century photograpsh of the Polytechnic, and some more recent 1980s photos. I have also been running regular searches across the Flickr site for photos of the University, and marking them as favourites. Through these searches I found several photographs of students and contacted the creator to see if they were interested in being involved in our project. We are now trying to set interview dates with several people who we have contacted via social media. We are also hoping to gain acquisitions of archival material from some of these people, one of whom has the only colour photograph of the swimming pool in 309 Regent Street that we have ever seen!

My vision for the University Archive Flickr site in the long run is three-fold. Firstly it acts as a way for us to get in touch with former students and encourage them to record their memories with us and hopefully to donate any relevant papers they might hold (the archive is particularly looking for ephemera that records the student experience, as a way on enriching the official records that we hold). Secondly it is a way for us to provide an online image bank for staff to search, that we can tag with multiple keywords, to try to encourage staff to use images from the archives in their presentations, whether historical or not. Having searched on the Flickr stream staff could then contact us for a high-resolution version. The archive holds a really rich cache of images that could be much better exploited by staff and students within the university but it's up to us to publicise them and find ways to make them useable beyond their immeadiate historical import. Thirdly, that we can use it as a way of attracting researchers beyond our natural audience into the archive, if used in conjunction with Twitter and a blog. For example, fashion students may be interested in our photographs of women from the 1880s onwards to look at changes in dress, interior design students in some of the fixtures and fittings of the buildings and typography students in scanned pages from some of the Student Union's publications. Although we could do all these things on our own website, putting them onto a larger, shared, site such as Flickr increases the chances of some happening upon one of our images and ultimately boosts the profile of the Archives and the University as a whole.