Photographs of National Trust Historic Sites found on Flickr.
These images of Acoma Sky City, Montpelier, Drayton Hall, Cliveden, Shadows on the Teche, and Robie House were all found on Flickr, the on-line photo sharing Web site. Nearly every National Trust Historic Sites can be found on Flickr in a variety ways: informal snapshots of family and friends, memories of an event, or carefully posed images of a building or landscape.
Flickr is one of the most popular photo-sharing Web sites and it’s available for free. Now owned by Yahoo, anyone with a Yahoo account can post their images and make them available to others. Visitors can browse these images, search by keywords, and respond with comments. Most images are public but they can also be secured so they are only accessible to those you authorize. Users can also create a “group” on a particular topic. You’ll find them for places (one for Charleston, South Carolina has nearly 600 members) as well as people, living and dead (there’s one for sculptor Daniel Chester French).
Here are four ways that historic sites can benefit from using Flickr (and perhaps other photo sharing programs such as Photobucket, TinyPic, and PictureTrail):
1. See what others think about your Site and its programs.
What do people think about your historic site? Want to get a different perspective of your place? Flickr can give you a glimpse of what visitors believe is important, found interesting, and want to remember. For example, search for Drayton Hall and Filoli on Flickr and you’ll discover significant differences in the subject matter. This elementary visual analysis can be very revealing and it may inspire to consider new programs to take advantage of visitor interests (or take care of problems you didn’t know existed). If you’d like to explore this further, see Eye Level’s discussion of the Kogod Courtyard and Lynda Kelly’s blog on audience research in museums.
2. Post your images on Flickr.
Get beyond the walls of your Web site and go where the action is. People are posting images about you on Flickr—don’t let them be the only vision of your Site. Add your images, inspire people with beautiful and fun photos of your place, and become part of the “visual conversation”. And it doesn’t just have to be your professionally staged photos, it can include decent photos taken by your staff or volunteers or historic images in your collections. The Tenement Museum posted images of the restoration of the new Irish apartment and the National Museum of Health and Medicine has been uploading pictures to Flickr since September 2006. Join a Flickr group or two (especially for a region) and add your images so people see you as well.
Worried that people will steal your images and sell them as postcards or recreate them as embarrassing images? It’s too late. People who want to do those things already have the ability—digital cameras are common and so is sharing them on-line with the world. Remember, if you have a Web site, you’re already putting images on the Internet that anyone can save and reuse without your permission. The solution is be sure you’re in the mix so your voice is also heard and not remain silent. Just be sure you’re posting images that can be shared, reused, and manipulated by others, so don’t upload copyrighted photos, invade someone’s privacy (you’ll especially want to avoid including images of children unless you have permission), or post anything else that shouldn’t be public (a photo of a boardmember eating a pig-sized piece of cake). Images of buildings, landscapes, and artifacts along with people at a public event are all safe to post (artworks produced in the 20th century may be protected by copyright, even if you own the original artwork, so investigate this a bit more). If you’re nervous but still want to participate, keep the resolution low or add a credit line across the bottom (but don’t expect to be credited and instead expect that the credit may be removed by others). Ultimately, if someone goes wild and uses your photos everywhere because they love your Site, would that really be so bad?
3. Post their images of your Site on Flickr.
Create buzz and interest about your Site by placing lots of photos onto Flickr. Creating a Flickr group is one of the easiest ways to do this and there are two approaches:
- encourage, invite, and remind visitors throughout the year to share their photos on your Flickr group. Include the message at the end of your tours, print it on event programs, place on a sign at the front desk, and mention it on your Web site.
- intentionally produce photos for posting on Flickr. Hire a photographer or two, invite a photo club for a special day at your site, assign a couple staff members to take photos at an event, host a workshop on architectural photography and then select the best images to share on-line.
These ideas have already been explored by museums in the fields of art and science. The Tate Britain set up a Flickr group alongside its exhibition How We Are which invited participation and gave prizes. The Victoria and Albert Museum has a dedicated Flickr group that encourages virtual and offline interaction. At the Walker’s opening for “Picasso and American Art”, visitors posed for digital photos that were manipulated with a “cubism effect” and posted on Flickr within minutes. The Bishop Museum in Hawaii developed an educational Flickr group called Ask a Bishop Museum Scientist. Upload an image of an organism you’ve found in the Hawaiian Islands and museum scientists will help you identify it. And Flickr is being used for promoting historic preservation. Fans of Coney Island are bringing attention to the history and threats to this fabled playground by the sea with its Goodbye Coney Island Flickr group.
The organization that’s exploring this aspect of Flickr on many fronts is the Brooklyn Museum. Their Web site has a page devoted to this with the message, “The Brooklyn Museum has noticed that our visitors are capturing wonderful images of the Museum and uploading their snapshots to the photo-sharing site Flickr. Visitors are welcome to bring their cameras to the Brooklyn Museum. Show us the Museum through your eyes by adding your photos to the Brooklyn Museum Group on Flickr.” Intrigued? Then you’ll also want to read the interview with Shelley Bernstein, the Manager of Information Systems at the Brooklyn Museum at museumtwo.blogspot.com.
4. Post their Flickr images on your Web site.
Copy them from Flickr and post a few on your Web site to provide a visitor’s perspective of a tour, a special event, or a place (of course, providing a credit to the photographer) . Take a look at Michigan in Pictures and you’ll discover a photo blog for fans of Michigan that draws on images from Flickr. If you want to use Flickr images but don’t have time to maintain a Web site, you can automate it with a Flickr Badge. The “badge” is box that displays an assortment of images from Flickr that are from your own collection, one of your groups, or everyone’s photos. You can also filter any of these options by a tag, if you wish. For an example, see the Flickr Group displayed on the Web site of the Lower East Tenement Museum.
Are four reasons insufficient? Want to learn more? Want another opinion? Check out the following:
- Search the Washington Post for various stories on the good and bad of Flickr.
- 2.0 at Work: Why You Should Use Flickr at Museum 2.0
- Percolations: Museums and Websites, Part III at Museum Blogging
- Museums and Flickr at Beth’s Blog
- Flickr as a Museum? An Opinion and Some Links at The Art Blog
- A video explaining Flickr for educational purposes at YouTube
- Online Photo Sharing in Plain English video by Common Craft at YouTube
| www.flickr.com
|
