All together now! Anzac collaboration on The Commons

On 25 April New Zealanders and Australians mark Anzac Day, the anniversary of the 1915 landing of Allied troops at Gallipoli / Gelibolu Yarımadası in Turkey, and the beginning of the 9-month Gallipoli campaign of World War I.

This year Australian and New Zealand members of The Commons have worked together to share photographs of the campaign in Gallipoli and later Anzac Day events on Flickr. Sets have been loaded by

• Us (National Library of NZ)
• Australian War Memorial
• State Library of New South Wales
• State Library of Queensland

The idea was sparked by Ellen at the State Library of New South Wales and warmly supported by the Flickr Commons group. The Indicommons crew also got behind the idea, and zyrcster wrote a fabulous post pulling all the upload together.

For me, it's been really interesting watching how making this extra effort to coordinate a joint upload and work with the community to promote it has resulted in a much higher level of tagging than usual on the images we've shared. The four collaborators tried to use AnzacDay as a shared tag, and I'm already seeing 1915, Gallipoli, destroyer and anzac appearing in our top 150 tags:




Not to mention some great info about periscope rifles




If I could ask for one thing, it'd be to see people making connections between the images, either with tags or comments - I've dipped my toe in the water by connecting these two views of Anzac Cove.





That for me would really exploit the true power of The Commons to join up all this like content held in unlike institutions.