Flanders' Focus Knack notices Flickr

A friend of mine just noted our Flickr site is in "Focus Knack, Flanders' most prominent media magazine." which may bring another group of hits from an audience we wouldn't normally have.

On the scanning side, we just accepted about 5500 scans of 35mm slides of Walter Reed medical center from our scanning contractor and picked up another 8 boxes of prints of the base to scan.

And it looks like Kathleen's tossed up a bunch of World War 1 facial reconstruction and plastic surgery images on her day off.

The Library of Congress likes Flickr and YouTube and iTunes...

EWS from the Library of Congress
101 Independence Avenue SE
Washington, DC 20540
Phone: (202) 707-2905
Fax: (202) 707-9199
Email: pao@loc.gov

March 25, 2009

Library of Congress Makes More Assets and Information Available Through New-Media Initiatives
YouTube and iTunes Launches Will Follow Groundbreaking Flickr Pact to Bring More Treasures to the Public

The Library of Congress will begin sharing content from its vast video and audio collections on the YouTube and Apple iTunes web services as part of a continuing initiative to make its incomparable treasures more widely accessible to a broad audience. The new Library of Congress channels on each of the popular services will launch within the next few weeks.
New channels on the video and podcasting services will be devoted to Library content, including 100-year-old films from the Thomas Edison studio, book talks with contemporary authors, early industrial films from Westinghouse factories, first-person audio accounts of life in slavery, and inside looks into the Library's fascinating holdings, including the rough draft of the Declaration of Independence and the contents of Lincoln's pockets on the night of his assassination.

“The Library of Congress launched the first U.S. agency-wide blog two years ago and continued its pioneering social-media role with initiatives such as the immensely successful Flickr pilot project,” said Librarian of Congress James H. Billington. “We have long seen the value of such interaction with the public to help achieve our missions, and these agreements remove many of the impediments to making our unparalleled content more useful to many more people.”

The General Services Administration today also announced agreements with Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo and blip.tv that will allow other federal agencies to participate in new media while meeting legal requirements and the unique needs of government. GSA plans to negotiate agreements with other providers, and the Library will explore these new media services when they are appropriate to its mission and as resources permit.

The Library began a groundbreaking pilot project with the popular Flickr photo-sharing service last year, loading 3,100 historic photos to start and an additional 50 photos each week. The overwhelmingly positive response from the Flickr user community not only brought broad public awareness to the Library's existing online collection of more than 1 million prints and photos at www.loc.gov, but also sparked creative interaction with them, as users helped provide Library curators with new information on photos with limited descriptions through public review and tagging. Library of Congress photos on Flickr currently have received more than 15 million views.

A Flickr initiative called The Commons was introduced with the Library’s project launch and a growing number of libraries, museums and archives have since started their own accounts within the Commons framework. The Library has been followed by 22 additional institutions from the United States, Australia, United Kingdom, Canada, France, Portugal, and the Netherlands that are sharing selections from their photo archives and inviting the public to contribute information.

The Flickr pilot placed the Library in a leadership role for other cultural and government communities exploring Web 2.0 possibilities. Information on Library news and events is now available through Twitter, more than 30 RSS and e-mail news alert services, and one of the first blogs from a federal agency.
Library staff worked with service providers to adjust technological and legal standards to permit participation in social-networking services by other federal agencies and non-profit organizations. All content made available on third-party sites will also be available on the Library’s own website at www.loc.gov.

Founded in 1800, the Library of Congress is the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution. The Library seeks to spark imagination and creativity and to further human understanding and wisdom by providing access to knowledge through its magnificent collections, programs and exhibitions. Many of the Library’s rich resources can be accessed through its website at www.loc.gov and via interactive exhibitions on a new, personalized Web site at myLOC.gov.

# # #

PR 09-055
03-24-09
ISSN 0731-3527

Anatomical Collections adds photos to Flickr

Brian of our Anatomical Collections department is putting some cool photos up on Flickr too.

Since we passed 500,000 viewers late last night, we've gone up to 628,026 now. You like us, you really like us (that's a quote of sorts). If you've found us from somewhere besides Wired, Boing Boing, NPR or Austria's public television, chime in and let us know, please.

500 Big Ones

We hit the 500,000 mark sometime early this morning. Oh, I'm talking about our Flickr account that Wired.com wrote about last week. As of 5 seconds ago, 503,160 views on 872 photos. We couldn't be happier. Thanks, everyone!

Wired article drives visitors to Flickr site

Last night around 10:20 we had 65,070 views. This morning at 4:45: 82,395. At 2pm: 173,792 views. At 7:15 pm: 246,540 views. At 7:36: 252,951 views. At 11:10: 310,089. And that's for 816 pictures.

Some people have been asking about HIPAA, which provides for privacy of medical records. These photographs were taken for medical education by various sources including the Army Medical Museum's Museum & Medical Arts Service (MAMAS) photographers which had no role in treating patients (or an electronic billing relationship with them which is the main criteria for applying HIPAA), but was sent out to theaters of war to take pictures. Additionally, when we created the scanning database, we did not capture the name of the patient. We have tried to be very careful about selecting images that are anonymous UNLESS the photograph was previously published with the names included (as all the Civil War and Signal Corps pictures were). The whole secure scanning database of over 500,000 images, which is not available to the general public, has many restricted images that only administrators can see. We'll continue to make a subset of them available somehow, but keep in mind that with over 2500 boxes of photographs - it's going to take a long time and there's a lot of junk.

These photographs have been available to the public as part of the AFIP's Medical Illustration Service Library since the 1940s - this is just the first time that they have been easily viewable without visiting Washington, DC. The other half of the old Army Medical Museum & Library's collection was put online years ago by the National Library of Medicine (which has a far larger budget than we do) - http://wwwihm.nlm.nih.gov/cgi-bin/gw_44_3/chameleon?skin=nlm&lng=en

Another excellent source is the Wellcome's photo library, which like ours, includes clinical images of diseases (which the Library of Medicine does not).

Finally about that 'permission' thing in the Wired article - what we're waiting on is permission to join Flickr Commons, which asked us last year and has certain legal requirements, not permission to post public domain photographs online. We can ask our web manager to post them on our own website - Flickr just has far more viewers and we could do it ourself in seconds once upon a time.

Anyone interested in the history of the medical museum and photographs may want to read this article.

The Wonders of Flickr

A Flickr user by the name of Endless Forms Most Beautiful included some of my photographs as his/her favorites so of course I had to go check out this person to see how nefarious their intentions are. Endless Forms says on their profile that "I'm using this as a place to collect interesting things for inspiration and teaching" and what a wonderful collection of images they have! This set, called Kunstformen, draves.org is from a series of 100 lithographs entitled "Kunstformen der Natur," German for "Artforms of Nature", created by Ernst Haeckel in 1899-1904. Here's just one example, that reminded me of something seen through an electron microscope. It's a fascinating set of images.

Thanks for checking us out!

The day I merged the 4 Flickr accounts into one, and talked about it here, our viewership soared on the combined account: 2790 views on that day alone. Thank you!

Baby's Got a Brand New Name

I had a "duh!" moment today when I talked to Mike about coming up with a name for our combined Flickr account. Medical Museum just tripped off his tongue and so it is. You can find us here at Flickr.

Moving Day

This morning I finished moving both of the remaining Flickr accounts to consolidate them into one. Feel free to visit and add tags and send us emails if we need to add individual photos to sets or even add more sets.

We're also batting around ideas of what to call it, rather than 99129398@N00. National Museum of Health and Medicine is a little wordy, NMHM too cryptic, and we've blanked out on anything else. We could use some ideas.

We're Migrating...

...to one Flickr account. We finally have a pro account so I took a leap of faith and downloaded a migration program that I had to have Microsoft Explorer (ugh) for, downloaded that, and am now in the process of migrating Otisarchives2 to Otisarchives1. It takes a while so the other two accounts probably won't be done until tomorrow.

Shhh, we had Flickr access today!

When I got to work this morning I had no network access at all. No email, no shared drives. When the network finally came up I checked out my (work-related, I swear) blogs on Google reader and actually saw pictures! Normally I just get text, and there was Mike's smiling face from Tuesday's post.
Hmmm, I thought. Could it be that we had access to other very bad things that we're normally blocked from? Is the suspense building for you like it was for me? In went www.flickr.com and there it was. Wow. Like a second chance at life. Quick, now, before they glom on to the fact that I'm at a banned place, what can I post? Eight went up before I got back to real work, so take a look.

Foiled again!

Mike mentioned a couple of days ago that we've been blocked by the Army from our Flickr accounts. Yeah. So now we have to load images onto a thumb drive or email them to ourselves at our personal accounts, and upload from home. Which is what I've just done. Inefficient. Inconvenient. A waste of resources/time. But we're Intrepid Archivists who will do what it takes. Here's the latest offering, a severely fractured skull of a Confederate soldier from the Civil War, Surgical Photograph 9 (SP009).

Virtual museums

We came across a 2006 article from the NY Times yesterday that I thought vastly interesting, about how 75% of all visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art never cross the threshold. My first thought was "the admission fee!" but as you'll see, I misinterpreted this statement. I'm so used to free admission to great museums in Washington that I was taken aback on my first visit to the Met, seeing it was going to cost me $20 to get in. Worth it, of course, but a bit of culture shock (good pun, no?).

No, what the article meant was the Met has, as of 2006, 15 million visitors a year to its website, a huge number compared to the 4.5 million people who pay 20 bucks a pop. I understand the $20 is a suggested amount but, as one who works in a museum and has something of an understanding of what makes it go, I feel pretty guilty strolling in free.

It's this same kind of attempt to raise awareness of our museum that drives Mike and me and other staff to post samples of our stuff to our Flickr accounts (and hope, wish, hope for a Commons account), to the Internet Archive and to this blog. We have pretty cool things, just like the Met, that we want to share with everyone. No sense hiding our light under a basket, is there? We'd love to have the same kind of presence the Met has, and to see the same kind of numbers hitting our sites.

Flickr success

We keep a log of all of our reference requests and I recently compared the number we have answered so far this year with the number last year at this time. I was pleased and surprised to see we're up between 25%-33%. The log doesn't say how the requester found us but it might be a good piece of information to add to next year's stats. My theory is that much of this increase comes from our Flickr accounts because many people are asking for "permission to use." I think advertisers, photo researchers, book illustrators, and the like are casting about for images and find exactly what they're looking for among our accounts.

Here's an example of how our collections are reaching an ever-wider audience. I handled this request recently and just today received in the mail a copy of the publication in which the image was published. El portavoz, a free community newspaper in Costa Rica, used one of our Reeve photos to illustrate an article about war wounded:

Military funeral at Arlington

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A woman emailed me a couple of months ago, asking if she could use one or two of my Flickr photos in a video she wanted to make to honor her father, who was buried at Arlington National Cemetery last spring. Of course I said yes, and went back to the cemetery to take some specific pictures for her. Please take a few minutes to watch her video and see parts of this iconic cemetery that needs just a one-word name: Arlington.

The cemetery's official website has details of its fascinating history that dates to America's Civil War. I think we who live here may take it for granted, but it really is a special, sacred place.

We're famous! Sorta.

Today we received an email from matador.org that two of our photos that we posted on our Flickr accounts have been picked up under the Creative Commons license for use on their website. I posted one that they used and looking at it now, I wonder what I thought was so great about it. But if it brings us traffic to our Flickr pages, I guess it's all right.

Old Walter Reed Hospital

Have I posted this before? I lose track. I was just looking at my Flickr stats and saw that this picture of the old (original) Walter Reed Hospital was viewed several times yesterday. I took this last fall, the second-best time of year to be in Washington. If you haven't been here in spring, put it on your Bucket List. Washington is indescribably beautiful in the spring, but fall is almost as good. Look at the color of that sky.

A Flickr / Getty Images deal in the works?

Somehow I stumbled across a report today that says Getty Images, one of the mammoth stock-image companies, is in talks with Flickr about trolling for images that have been uploaded there. Of course Flickr can't make deals on people's work but it can give exclusive rights to Getty for that kind of access. Some people who have commented say it's not so much that Getty wants access for art's sake (my paraphrase) but to keep access from other companies. I don't really know, but just in case, being the Flickr addict that I am, I'm going to have to start beefing up my tags on my own pictures. Oh, and if you're wondering what this has to do with the museum, etc., etc., if this is indeed the case it can only mean better exposure for our own pictures that we've uploaded. The latest account is here.

Yet another new Flickr page

While we're waitingwaitingwaiting for Flickr to grant us a Creative Commons account, we've filled our third account and have started a fourth. Please take a look - the five pictures now residing there are feeling a little lonely.

Cool Flickr site

Virginia Commonwealth University's Tompkins-McCaw Library Special Collections' photostream - a mixture of photographs, artifacts and scans from books. They linked to one of our flickr sites last week. I liked the editorial cartoons, but the photographs of medical school dissections probably get more viewers.