CUL on Flickr (not quite Commons)
The Nunnery (East Façade of East Wing), Chichén Itzá
Through the efforts of CUL’s Library Outside the Library group (proprietors of CULLabs), the Library has now established a presence on Flickr. Through the efforts of Susette Newberry, Dianne Dietrich, Baseema KrKoska, and the rest of the LOL team, over 1000 images from the A.D. White Architectural Photograph Collection are now up on Flickr. The plan is that these photos will eventually go in the Flickr Commons, joining collections from the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, and a number of other institutions. Unfortunately, Yahoo has put a temporary hold on adding new institutions to the Flickr Commons, so the decision was made to go ahead and release the photos anyway. All these images have no known copyright restrictions in the United States (your mileage may vary in foreign countries). Under the Library’s new public domain image policy, you are free to do as you wish with any of these images, although the Library does request credit so people will know where to find the originals.
The images come with some useful metadata, including things like the date of the building, date of the image, architect (where known), and the location. You can use Flickr’s map view to see the distribution of the buildings across the world, and the individual sets of photos are divided up by country. We strongly encourage comments on these images, particularly if you can provide additional information about the subject matter of the photograph. We’ve got a couple of examples of comments that show modern day images alongside of the originals: Paris–Hôtel de Cluny and New Louvre, Pavillon de Rohan (just scroll down to the comments to see the comparison). We’re hoping that our move to the Flickr Commons happens soon, since that will greatly increase the visibility of these materials, and it should increase the comments and tags. For some of the Library of Congress images, the public has added significant information and links to sources: one example is the image titled “Jones Barn where dynamite was found“. You can read more about the LoC experience with their Flickr pilot on their site.
The Cornell University Library has a signficant number of digital collections, and a wide range of public domain materials. The LOL group will be looking at other collections that we can add to Flickr, and there are a number of efforts at CUL to use non-traditional channels to make all our materials more accessible and available to researchers, students, and the general public. You’ll find a large and growing number of books from CUL available at the Internet Archive, as print-on-demand copies through Amazon, and on Google Books.
You can find CUL on Flickr at the easy-to-remember web address http://flickr.com/photos/cornelluniversitylibrary. I’ll leave you with a few of my favorite images from the A.D. White Collection:
Collection of Grotesques from Reims, France
Interior, Saint Sophia (Hagia Sofia)
Salisbury Cathedral, West Façade
