I promised a follow-up after we’d been in The Commons for a while, so here you go.
Top 10 Reasons The Commons on Flickr is Awesome:
10.
George Oates is cool and George runs The Commons.
9.
Come together now: Cross-collection searching. Museums have been having trouble with this for too many years. It took Flickr 6 months. George, we want a widget!
8.
Flickr is a global community and that means…say it with me now: multi-language tagging
7.
Flickrites are creative. We asked “tell us how you are using these images” and look at one of the responses we got. Note the tag that indicates this is a mash-up of material from our lantern slide collection and the boxer from Library of Congress for the 34th Weekly Contest on Man Ray. Super fun. Thanks, The hills are alive!
6.
Flickr peeps are correcting our captions…that’s LIéna not Jena. In turn, we are updating records on Flickr and at home.
5.
…are eagle-eye at catching inconsistencies
4.
…are showing us current images to our lantern slides
3.
…helping identify unidentified views
2.
Institutions. The Commons now has 6 participants: Library of Congress, Powerhouse Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Bibliothèque de Toulouse, George Eastman House and yours truly. There will be more on the way soon, but for now take a look if you have not already.
1.
People. We just uploaded our latest set of Egyptian Lantern Slides. This time, in honor of all the Flickr peeps who make The Commons awesome, we uploaded a set of images that have a people focus.
Views, Objects: Egypt. General Views\People [selected images]. View 080: Partly submerged palms above Nile dam, Upper Egypt., 1908, Copyright, 1908, by Stereo-Travel Co. Brooklyn Museum Archives (S10|08 General Views_People, image 9823).
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Eastern Parkway/Brooklyn Museum
Thanks for the followup, Shelley. I love the new image focus. People–perfect! My only question: when do you ever sleep? Deb
Beautiful stuff!
Hi Ryan, right back at ‘ya! Congrats on your launch and welcome!
Cross-collection searching – wow! That is fantastic….
Shelley, what are you guys going to do, if anything, about the difference between the “No Known Copyright Restrictions” license on Flickr Commons, and your site’s blanket license (a CC “no-derivs”) license when your online collections overlap with what’s on Flickr? (We’re dealing with that issue right now …)
Ah, yes, it is problematic. George has explained – the “no known copyright” is a statement, not a license. One of the things that really bothers me about The Commons design, however, is the “no known” sits in the same place in the UI as the CC licensing you can normally apply on Flickr, so to everyone who knows Flickr it appears to actually be a license by its very placement. It’s confusing for sure. I’m going to send this to George – maybe she can clarify.
Hello!
Let me preface this by saying I’m not a lawyer, but was lucky enough to work with a very clever one at the Library of Congress
Perhaps the “no known copyright restrictions” creation myth would be useful here… You see, when we first started working with the Library of Congress mid 2007, they made it very clear that none of the licenses Flickr offered (All Rights Reserved, and a selection of Creative Commons licenses) were impossible for them to use since they are a collecting institution, and therefore unable to claim ownership of the copyright of their holdings, or to issue a *license* for its re-use.
That meant we needed to develop an assertion, or statement, that to the best of their knowledge, the images they were publishing weren’t subject to copyright restrictions, but, if a copyright claim was to reveal itself, there is an out (and the image could be taken down, or whatever).
What’s interesting to me in the course of developing this program is how institutions are taking a good look at how they claim ownership and when, and in some cases, taking the opportunity to revisit the structures they’ve put in place.
As I’m sure Shelley would testify, it’s liberating and generous to give things away for free… particularly if you’re a public institution
(Hope that answers the question…)
And Shelley, the important thing about the positioning of this “statement” on the page is that the place it’s in is the place that people know to look for information on their potential rights to use the image. Along the line you’re drawing, you could argue that CC licensing info should be in a different place to ARR, because they are different… but, I think they’re all related – I.E. Can I use this photo? – so can be in the same place. As always, design decisions are arguable
So, Matt, getting back to the original question – it’s something we are working out as we move forward, but it didn’t stop us from going forward in the first place
Many of the images we are uploading to Flickr are ill placed on our own site and will be re-designed in the near future as part of the collection going online. When we fold them into that structure, we’ll deal with the specific mention of this license (as well as bringing in the Flickr comments and tags via the API), but until then it may continue to be less than as clear as we’d like.
Giving stuff away is great, especially for an institution like Brooklyn Museum with a community-driven mission. The question I was asking was more about how to merge a website’s blanket copyright statement (like cc-attribution-noncommercial-noderivs), which appears to cover the entire site, with “No Known Copyright Restrictions” when the same image appears in two different places.
The Flickr statement is less restrictive, and it may look strange to restrict reuse when someone gets the image off the museum’s site. But for most museums, adding object-specific copyright statements would be incredibly arduous.
Agreed. That’s why we are waiting so we can sort this out in a programmatic way as we fold in content (and we know this is an issue moving forward). Less than clear, but it will get more clear over time and that seemed OK to keep moving forward.
For what it’s worth, the idea of “no known copyright restrictions” has begun propagating from Flickr to other sites, like Wikimedia.
I worked briefly with the chaps who wrote the code to post Commons photos onto Wikimedia to try to get the language right. It’s nearly there, though there’s interesting debate happening within the Wikimedia community about the right way to do it.
I agree Matt, it is weird (and possibly inappropriate) to claim a license in one place on content that has “no known copyright restrictions” in another, but there are enormous infrastructures all over the place designed to protect copyright and ownership, not to release it.
At this stage, it’s about precedent… we’ve managed to demonstrate a publishing concept over at The Commons, and hopefully, it will “trickle down.”
Oops – forgot the links
Here’s an example of a Brooklyn Museum image sucked from The Commons and popped on to Wikimedia, with the “no known copyright restrictions” language in tow:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Brooklyn_Museum_-_Egypt-Thebes _%28pd%29.jpg
And, here’s the debate on Wikimedia about the appropriate handling of the new usage statement:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/Template:F lickr-no_known_copyright_restrictions
These comments prompted me to go back to the copyright page on our website. I don’t actually think there’s a conflict here. What we say is:
Non-commercial use of text and images >> in which Brooklyn Museum holds the copyright
Looks like my comment got cropped, so here’s a complete version:
These comments prompted me to go back to the copyright page on our website. I don’t actually think there’s a conflict here. What we say is:
Non-commercial use of text and images in which Brooklyn Museum holds the copyright is permitted, with attribution, under the terms and conditions of a Creative Commons License.
Emphasis on “in which Brooklyn Museum holds the copyright.”
The images we put on Flickr Commons are all either in the public domain or old enough that they probably would be, if we knew the date and creator, thus the designation “no known copyright restrictions.” This trumps the Creative Commons license noted on our website, so there isn’t any conflict between the Museum website and what we say on the Commons that I see.
Deb Wythe
I’m assuming that 10 percent of your flickr “peeps” are responsible for 90 percent of the activity on your site, since this is the norm for such online communities. How many of these peeps were already known to your curators?
A few more questions:regarding “crowdsourced” data on images in your collection:
– Do you verify user-supplied tags and comments?
– How many crowdsourced leads were staff unable to verify?
– How many items were tagged with conflicting if not mutually-exclusive terms?
– What is the “arrearage” or backlog of crowdsourced tags, comments, and notes to be verified?
– What kind of disclaimer do you provide patrons about the unverified crowsourced data that appears on the Web with your institution’s imprimatur?
– When will you do a cost-benefit analysis of crowdsourcing versus professional curatorial research and cataloging?
Web 2.0 is great for outreach, and is certainly of use in widening curatorial networks of knowledgeable collectors, scholars, and amateur enthusiasts, but I am concerned that there has been no impartial independent review of the quality and value of “crowdsourced” data in the museum and library environment.
Hi Mike,
I’m going to refer you to the Library of Congress on this – the LOC has done excellent long format report on the benefits and findings regarding the issues you are talking about here. Read it here. I believe the Powerhouse is working on a long format report as well that will be released soon, so keep your eyes out for that. It’s a lot easier to report these kinds of things when you have some room – not easy to do in either a blog post or a comment like this one.
Shelley:
I have read the report from LOC P&P, and it does not answer the questions posed above.
Until there are objective assessments of the quality of crowdsourced data, I strongly advise caution in their use by museums and libraries. You risk putting your institutional stamp of approval on erroneous and persistent public information.
Outreach projects using Web 2.0 are powerful and effective; they do not need to be justified by positing a curatorial value which as yet has no demonstrated basis in fact.
Hi Mike,
I think there are two different things in action here–research and discovery–and two different audiences (though with some overlap, for sure.
Researchers are looking for very specific things and yes, they need vetted data, curatorial input, and good solid cataloging. They’re the ones our database serves and everything we can do to improve it is worthwhile.
People who are in discovery mode cast a wide net, using tags and keywords, and don’t necessarily expect that everything they find is relevant. What they want is the ability to browse, rather than drilling down through data to the one perfect answer. Serendipity is a big part of what they’re doing (and having fun doing it.
Just to let you know where I’m coming from, since I haven’t posted on this before — though I have definitely given it some thought. I manage the Digital Lab at the Museum (and used to be the Museum Archivist). We’re the ones who create the images you see on the website, and we run the Museum’s image database.
When I first started working on the data template for that database I was convinced that we needed to include subject and authority terms developed by professionals. But cataloging at that level is time-consuming and expensive and Collection on the Web (and Flickr) went live without the extra data.
I’m a tagging convert. I’ve been watching the process now for several months and am more and more convinced that the tagging that people are adding to our website and our Flickr images is way, way, way more valuable than I ever thought it would be and in a lot of different ways. We’re getting a lot of good information added to the records, people are looking for and finding images, and they’re interacting with us about their questions and the information they have to add.
In other words, it’s not all about finding a picture, it’s about interaction, or community, if you like.
As to giving an institutional “stamp of approval” to tags as you caution against: I’m a firm believer that 1) there’s no such thing as a good tag or a bad tag and that 2) people know that they are not vetted. They’re all just tags. It’s an informal, additive process–the value is in the aggregate, not in the “correctness” of each individual tag. When people see something wrong or conflicting, they let us know (and believe me, they do.
Hi,
Are there any more recent studies on social media for special collections/archives? I know some libraries still do not feel they have the time/staff or do not feel tagging is valid. Why aren’t other museums/museum libraries willing to try it as you are?
Thanks.