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October 14, 2005
Flickr as digital collection hosting example
I've gotten into the habit of only perusing my Bloglines account every few weeks or so. For now I've decided that this is an OK thing, but that may change.
In any case, in catching up with my beloved Boing Boing feed (a blog that I often quickly check for updates outside of Bloglines now and again, but will go through past posts to catch up), I found this:
Mom's recipes, a photo set
[Boing Boing 17 sept '05]
Phil says, "These are scans of all of the recipes in my mom's recipe collection."
After my presentation on WebJunction a few weeks ago, I did get a few comments that it was nice to see Flickr from a user application perspective, as opposed to just hearing about it, or just looking at it from outside. This little collection is an excellent, practical example of what libraries could do with Flickr from a small digital collection perspective.
If you take a look at the scans set on Phil's Flickr account, you'll see that he organized them all into a single set that can be linked to directly, containing 242 individual photos. Clicking on a quick sampling of 10 photos showed that Phil has marked his images with a Creative Commons license, and allows viewing and downloading of the images in different sizes, with the original size being a healthy 1574 x 864 pixels. The title for each scan is the name of the recipe on the card, but the description for each card is the same: "From my mom's recipe collection."
Flickr users have commented on the humor in the recipes and the familiarity of the recipe card stationary, questions about the terminology in the recipes, and just what a great idea it was for him to do this (and, incidentally, a note showing where his mother had handwritten her maiden name on a card).
If Phil wanted to get totally archive happy with this scanned collection, he could transcribe the text of each recipe into the description. The tags Phil chose, recipe, cookies, the name of the recipe, and more, can not only apply within his individual collection, but can be cross-referenced with the public Flickr photos collection. That makes for tasty metadata. And with the new clustering feature, Flickr will make an effort to show you groupings of related tags.
Your library's first digital collection by Flickr set need not be so huge. It could be a collection of entries for a drawing contest, a small collection of interesting old card catalog cards, or some scans from an interesting local history collection.
October 14, 2005 1:07 AM