Friday 23 January 2009

Flickr Commons

The Library of Congress have been using Flickr for a while now to increase the accessibility of some of their enormous collection of historically interesting and out of copyright photographs as part of the Flickr Commons project. many other cultural institutions are also participating, including the State Library of NSW.

Last october the Library of Congress issued a report that gave the experiment a thumbs up:

"In the first 24 hours after launch, Flickr reported 1.1 million total views on our account; a little over a week later, the account had received 3.6 million page views and 1.9 million total visits. That included over 2 million views of the photos, and over 1 million views of the photostream. By early October, LC photos were averaging approximately 500,000 views a month and had crossed the 10 million mark in total views and the 6 million mark for visits. Interestingly, 82% of this traffic was referred from within Flickr; only 3% came from search engines"

So, could UTAS Libraries be increasing the accessibility of some of our digital collections by using Flickr Commons? I would suggest it makes a lot of sense.

Full PDF Report(http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/flickr_report_final.pdf)

Flickr Commons (http://www.flickr.com/commons)