Flickering Flickr

Our assignment this week was to look at Flickr. I've looked at it before. It's a fun tool for individuals to post their photographs around to their friends and share them easily. But I'm not sold on its usefulness for institutions.

The Library of Congress, Library of Virginia and a handful of others have signed up and posted collections. But I feel that we're just throwing things out the door, hoping someone will want to pick something up. It's certainly one approach, but I'm not sure it's the most effective one for institutions that are short on time and money.

Rather than spend time uploading images to the Flickr server, I'd rather see us upload our Museum and Manuscript records to OCLC. OCLC is a partner of Google and other search engines and provides portions of their database to add to the search engine's databases. Then all that material will be available for searching through search engines. If there's a hit, they'll see the record and any image we've digitized.

Now that Cross database searching is up (yippee!), we'll soon be launching a list of digital collections. Because the main page will be hosted on the VHS web site, the search engines will crawl the collection titles, and because it launches a predefined search through STAR, new images will be added to each collection as created. Everyone who's seen it thinks it's very cool.

So while Flickr serves a purpose for individuals, I'm not sure it provides good solutions for institututions wanting to get their collections out.