Looking at the library Flicker groups and found myself fractured. Am I a cataloguer? Am I photographer? Am I anything? If anyone can get anything (photos and cataloguing) on the internet, why pay money for it?
Also, If you want people to tag pictures on your pictures database, how will you induce them to take the time? It is time consuming to open a flicker account and post pictures, to take pictures in the first place. Why do people love us so much that they would want to do all that?
It reminds me of the other day. I had to book tickets at the opera House and I turned on my P.C., filled in the registration form, chose my tickets (filled in my credit card number), paid my I.P. bill and pressed enter. Low and behold they charged me a $7.50 "service" fee. What was the service? I did all the work.
2 comments:
You pose an interesting question - it certainly is working for the Library of Congress (they loaded 3,000 images on Flickr) and also the Powerhouse museum. The numbers of tags the public contributed to the images is phenomenal. It's possible via the net a new group of clients are discovering these services?
Mylee (PLS)
I look at the LOC and the PHM stuff on Flickr frequently. And I comment, and I tag.
Browsing the photographs on Flickr is easy, because of the image size on the splash page, and the ease of getting a (usually) larger pic via the "all sizes" function.
Of course the key is for those institutions to put up images which are interesting to people. The Flickr users WANT to look at photographs. That's why they are on Flickr.
Also, it's really hard to search for specific images within the library of congress site, it's actually easier to use flickr if you have an idea that what you want may be in the Bain Collection, or the wartime colour images.
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