NYPL Labs

So we’re off! On Monday night at around 6pm EST, the NYPL took its first steps into the Flickr Commons.

About a year ago, Flickr launched the Commons to share and communally describe the public photo collections of the world’s great cultural heritage institutions. Starting in January with The Library of Congress, and continuing in the months that followed with contributions from the likes of The Smithsonian Institution, The Brooklyn Museum, The National Maritime Museum, The National Library of New Zealand, the Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands and others, the Commons has grown steadily over the past year into a truly remarkable, and probably unprecedented, public photography resource. All images are posted with “no known copyright restrictions,” which essentially means public domain, but with a few caveats.

The NYPL has stepped up with an initial contribution — a sort of sampler, or appetizer, course — of 1,300 images culled from various areas of our diverse photographic collections. Here’s a snap of our photostream, organized in sets, which should give you some sense of the variety:

Public response so far has been fantastic. We’ve been Boing Boing’d, Kottke’d, and greeted with generally open arms around the blogosphere. But it’s on Flickr itself that the truly exciting stuff is happening. Here are some quick stats from our first full day live (Tuesday, December 16):

53,220 image views
123 comments
1,112 favorites
121 images tagged
380 *new* tags

You’ll note the qualified *new*…

When Flickr launched the Commons in January with LOC as pilot partner, they went for a blank slate approach. Photos were posted with tag fields intentionally unpopulated (except for the basic “Library of Congress”) and they sat back and watched closely to see how users would respond. From the LOC’s report (PDF) on the project (bottom of p.7):

On Flickr, selected elements of the PPOC MARC records were loaded as descriptions with user-friendly labels. We could have turned the subject terms in the MARC records into Flickr tags, but the idea was discarded in an effort to reduce any unintended influence on the tagging suggestions of the Flickr community.

Things went well after that.

In addition to thousands of comments, favorites and image annotations, 67,176 tags were added by 2,518 unique Flickr accounts. Later, in the culmination of this first experimental phase, more than 500 LOC catalog records ended up being updated and enhanced with information provided by the Flickr community. Amazing.

Having studied the results of the LOC experiment, and the participation of subsequent Flickr partners, we decided to tweak the conditions slightly. As with LOC, NYPL librarians have already spent a ton of time describing these photos, particularly with subject headings that convey the contents of the images. Rather than discard this information, we added a selection of these headers, repurposed them as tags, and posted them as a nucleus for Flickr viewers to build from. The hope was that this would stimulate rather than stifle activity on the Commons, with librarians and non-librarians collaborating on the description of the material. Judging by initial reactions, Flickr users seem unfazed by the presence of this seed data and have been tagging and commenting vigorously.

As for comments, there’s been a whole range: basic enthusiasm (”beautiful!” “stunning!”), corrections, illuminations, geotagging, technical tips, questions about high res reproductions, and questions that hopefully we’ll be able to pass along to our reference librarians. Janet Murray, our metadata specialist, has been browsing some of the comments with us and has already noted places that could potentially correct or otherwise enrich our own records. We’re excited…

The next step is for our curators and reference librarians to jump into the fray to answer queries (and perhaps submit some too), and to sift through all the user-contributed data. We’re still figuring out how best to track activity: Flickr offers some statistics analysis and a recent activity feed for one’s general photostream. Unfortunately, it doesn’t get much more granular than that, which is a pity because we’d like to provide a way for curators to track specific subsets of photos from their division’s collections. We’re pondering a couple of possible solutions. One is building our own custom comments feed through the Flickr API. The other is hiring an intern to monitor activity and do something like a daily digest, which we can then use to direct relevant comments to the appropriate staff members. I suspect we’ll end up adopting some combination of the two.

We’re also working during this initial info gathering phase to develop coherent and sustainable policies that allow us to abide by Flickr social norms, but also keep our focus on the appropriate areas. One issue is accounts. In replying to comments, do we all use the main NYPL Commons account and just sign our names manually at the bottom? Or do we use our personal Flickr accounts? Or, do we create personal, NYPL-dedicated Flickr accounts and identify those with the official NYPL lion avatar?

Another little protocol question that came up right away was regarding contacts: do we make anyone who names us as a contact our own contact? We’ve decided no, except possibly for other Commons partner institutions. Of course, working with the Flickr community is the main reason we got involved with the Commons, and we’re thrilled when Flickr users name us as a contact (which adds a feed from our photostream onto their personal pages), but we want to put our focus (and not unlimited resources) on conversations, tagging, and annotating directly around our images: library work. Then there’s groups: do we accept invitations to include our images in Flickr group photo pools? We’ve decided yes.

All in all, we expect to learn a great deal from Flickr users and are thrilled at the exposure that this project is already giving to our photographic collections. We also see the Flickr Commons as a training ground for our staff (and for the DEG) — a place to get some serious hands-on experience collaborating with users in a vibrant social Web community. Down the road, we’ll definitely be considering implementing similar tools and features on our own site, but this also speaks to an important new element in our digital strategy: engaging with users in digital environments other than our own website.

Whether you’re talking about our brick-and-mortar libraries or nypl.org, the library has always been more than simply a place. It is a series of informational and social vectors. Some of those vectors are intangible and impossible to trace: the countless ways, large and small, that the library is a shaping presence in people’s lives. Other vectors can lead to well-defined spaces, such as Flickr, external to our own. We aim to be active and engaged in those spaces, and to foster the creation of new ones, wherever possible.

Stay tuned for further reports from our Flickr experiment. This is just week one of what promises to be an extended exploration. We’ll be documenting and reflecting as we go. Oh, and a big round of applause is due to Joe Dalton who worked tirelessly to bring this to fruition. And to George Oates, whose untimely departure from Yahoo!/Flickr shocked and saddened us. We wish George all the best and expect great things to come before too long.

Note: this post was adapted from an earlier post on the NYPL public blog.

P.S.

A quick note of introduction. Hi, I’m Ben. This is my first post on the DEG blog, although I joined the team about four months ago as a Digital Producer. Before NYPL, I worked for three and a half years co-leading a little think tank/experimental shop in Brooklyn called the Institute for the Future of the Book, where I orchestrated publishing experiments and wrote regularly on their blog, if:book, about the evolution of reading and writing in the digital era. I plan to work at NYPL on related issues: digital publishing, online reading, networked communities. It’s good to finally get up and running here!