January update on The Commons on Flickr

The Commons goes on ... and new champions emerge

As many know, George Oates, the driving force behind The Commons on Flickr, was laid off by Yahoo last December (Seb Chan's blog post spoke for many of us in cultural institutions who have been inspired by George's enthusiasm and generosity).

Other Flickr staffers have stepped into the gap, and The Commons seems to be moving forward, with the New York Public Library joining the ranks.

The news of George's departure also triggered the creation of a new Flickr Commons group (see Shelley Bernstein's blog post on the topic). Led by some long-time and extremely active Flickr members, the group really demonstrates the passion of the community for The Commons, with its research, then and now, and theme (parades; delivering the mail) strands.

I've been following and contributing to the group with great interest, and am really excited that they've just launched a blog: http://www.indicommons.org. I think the group, and now the blog, have already done so much to move The Commons along; it now feels like even more of a shared activity and community.

National Library keeps going on too

After the very positive early response to our debut on The Commons (and buoyed by the report released by the Library of Congress), the decision has been made to keep adding more photos to our Commons stream. We'll be adding a new batch of images (about a dozen at a time) every week or two.

The first batches off the block were these photos taken in Samoa in the 1880s-1890s (including Robert Louis Stevenson's birthday party in 1893, shown below) and a selection of Samuel Heath Head's photographs of automotive trade shows (plus this very appealing shot of a motorcycle rally on New Brighton beach).



New mash-up from Paul Hagon

After Paul Hagon released his before and after mash-up of our Commons photos with Google street maps, I've been very conscientiously geo-tagging as many images as possible with precise coordinates. One of the next batches I'll be loading will increase the number of photos of urban locations in the panorama set.

Paul's just released another mash-up, using the NYPL's photos. As he explains in his post about the mash-up:

The process for this has been a little bit different to the previous then and now demonstrations. The images that have been posted don’t have any geo-location metadata (a latitude or longitude) so they can’t be placed directly on a map in the same manner as other Commons photographs. What they do have instead, is very good street addresses in their titles.

The google maps API has geocoding API call that translates a human readable address into a latitude and longitude. So if we pass the title of a photo into the API - let’s say "Willow Street, No. 113, Brooklyn", it returns the latitude and longitude of "40.6978614, -73.9955804".